TORY 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 



lift. 



Uniftrm with this Volume. 

ON THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
'"' & Hectare. 

By WELLIAM P. ATKINSON, 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND HISTORY IN THE MASSACHUSETTS 
INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. 

i6mo. Cloth. Price 50 cents. 

" Contains so many wise suggestions concerning methods in 
study and so excellent a summary of the nature and principles 
of a really liberal education that it well deserves publication for 
the benefit of the reading public. Though it makes only a slight 
volume, its quality in thought and style is so admirable that all 
who are interested in the subject of good education will give to it 
a prominent and honorable position among the many books upon 
education which have recently been published. For it takes 
only a brief reading to perceive that in this single lecture the 
results of wide experience in teaching and of long study of 
the true principles of education are generalized and presented 
in a few pages, each one of which contains so much that it 
might be easily expanded into an excellent chapter." — The 
Library Table. 



ON HISTORY 



AND 



THE STUDY OF HISTORY, 



Cgr.ee Sectored 



By WILLIAM P. ATKINSON, 

Professor of English and History in the Massachusetts Institute 
of Technology. 



\fl 




BOSTON: 
ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1884. 






THE LIBRARY 
or CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON 



Copyright, 1884, 
By William P. Atkinson. 



®ntfjttsttg $ress : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



NOTE. 



The originals of the following Lectures were given to 
my own classes, composed of young men from eighteen 
to twenty-five years of age. In preparing them for a 
wider audience, I have given them a somewhat greater 
extension; but as they contain nothing which I either 
have not said, or might not have said, to their first 
hearers, I have preferred to retain their original form. 
For the opinions they contain I alone am responsible. 

W. P. A. 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF 
HISTORY. 



I. 

I purpose giving you this winter a course of 
lessons on the contents of the two small text-books 
that have been placed in your hands. 1 These little 
books deal, as you see, with History and Literature ; 
but I have to say, at the very outset, that it is im- 
possible to learn either History or Literature from 
them. I must add that it will be impossible to 
learn History or Literature from my lectures. His- 
tory and Literature will not indeed be their subject, 
because it is as impossible to teach them by lectures 
as it is to teach them by text-books. My subject 
will be How to Study History and Literature ; and 

1 Freeman's " Short Sketch of European History " and Brooke's 
" Primer of English Literature." I use the former, because its 
author is a trustworthy scholar and not a mere compiler, and I 
can find nothing better, though something better is greatly to be 
desired. The latter, so far as it goes, could hardly be improved. 



6 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

it is for that reason that, in addition to your text- 
books, you have been required to provide yourselves 
with blank books, which you will be expected to fill 
with my notes and references, and to submit to me 
from time to time for inspection. 1 If I succeed in 
the object I have in view, the result of our studies 
in this department will, I hope, be the modest con- 
clusion that we do not know either History or Lit- 
erature, but a conclusion accompanied on your part, 
who I trust have much time before you, with the 
conviction that to seek to know more will be not 
merely one of the highest pleasures, but also one 

1 For want of a proper reference library, containing the princi- 
pal works used or mentioned in my lectures, and for want of time 
on the part of my hearers, this is as far as I can carry my method 
of teaching at present. To realize it completely, there should be 
within reach of the class a duplicate set of the authorities referred 
to in the lectures, and the students should be taught by systematic 
lessons in research the right methods of using them. They should 
be taught, in fact, the art of reading, which it is safe to say schools, 
as at present conducted, have not or have very rarely taught them. 
Such a reference library adapted to the particular text-books in 
hand need not be very extensive or costly, and would constitute a 
true literary or historical laboratory ; and such exercises in the use 
of books would be the counterpart of laboratory practice in the 
physical sciences. 

This was written before the publication of the little book, edited 
by Professor Stanley Hall, of Harvard College, entitled "Methods 
of Teaching History" (Boston: Ginn, Heath, & Co., 1883), where 
such a mode of teaching is very well described. See also Professor 
Adams's tract in the publications of Johns Hopkins University. 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 7 

of the most serious duties which a well-educated 
and intelligent man can set before himself. 

Perhaps it will be well to begin with asking what 
History and Literature are, and why students here 
should be required to give any attention to them. 
I have known those who complained of this. " We 
came here," they said, u to study Science, in order to 
become engineers, chemists, architects, and the like; 
and we cannot see the propriety of compelling us 
to devote any portion of our time to the study of 
History. Moreover, we studied History at school, 
and we do not like it, or care anything about it. In 
fact, at school we hated it. What we learned we 
have entirely forgotten, and this will be sure to be 
the fate of any History we may be compelled to 
learn here. We have no taste for History." 

Another says : " I like History well enough. I 
have read a good many Histories, — Macaulay, 
Prescott, Motley, — and perhaps some time or 
other I shall read more if I find others as en- 
tertaining. Still, I do not see what reading His- 
tory has to do with a scientific education. I 
thought that was made up of severe studies like 
mathematics, and of practical -and experimental 
work. Why not postpone mere reading till we have 
done all that, and have leisure to amuse ourselves 



8 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

with the narratives of what happened in the past ? " 
Or perhaps another says : " I admit that a knowl- 
edge of the past is valuable as well as interesting, 
but I have tried in vain to acquire it. As fast as I 
learn the names and dates and facts, they slip out 
of my memory. It is utterly useless for me to try 
to learn History. I have no talent for History." 

These are examples of views about the study of 
History which I am constantly meeting. Let us 
examine a little the ideas of its relation to educa- 
tion which they imply : the idea that History is 
good for those who have what is called a taste for 
it, but useless for those who have not ; the idea 
that History may be good as a part of some kinds 
of education, but has no place in that kind of edu- 
cation which goes by the name of " scientific ; " 
the idea that the study of History is properly no 
part of education at all, but forms a part of what is 
called general reading, which one can take up at 
any time, or pursue in any manner ; or, again, the 
idea that the study of History is the process of 
packing away in the memory, in their proper order, 
as great a number as possible of facts and names 
and dates, and that whoever is unsuccessful in that 
is incapable of learning History. 

I need not say that I think all these popular 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 9 

notions about the study of History erroneous, and 
that the very opposite of them is true ; that, for 
instance, the question whether one should study 
History or not does not depend at all upon the 
question whether he has what is called a taste for 
it, but that every one who is to be educated at all 
must study it ; and that therefore the study of it is 
as much an integral part of the kind of education 
which goes by the name of scientific as of any 
other. Again, the idea that the study of History 
consists in reading books of History, when and 
how and in what order you please, is about as far 
from the correct view as would be similar notions 
of the study of mathematics, where certainly it 
would be an odd way to begin, say with spherical 
trigonometry, following that up with a little alge- 
bra, and then a little geometry and arithmetic. 
Such a course of mathematical study would be apt 
to leave a certain degree of confusion in the stu- 
dent's mind, not unlike the confusion left by a sim- 
ilar course of History, and the student would be 
sure to conclude that he had no taste for mathe- 
matical studies. 

Let us see if a truer view of historical study will 
not enable us to see also what place it ought to 
hold in our scheme of education. You come here, 



10 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

it is very true, to make yourselves into architects, 
chemists, engineers, and the like, and at first sight 
it would seem as if the directest way to that end 
were to study nothing but architecture, chemistry, 
or engineering. Perhaps, however, it will turn out 
that that is the very worst way to accomplish your 
object, and that the problem of the so-called scien- 
tific education is more complicated than it looks. 
If indeed the Institute of Technology could be 
compared to a locomotive-engine factory, such a 
notion of a course of scientific study, embracing 
nothing but what bore directly on the student's 
immediate object, would be quite in order. You 
go to the locomotive builder and say : " Turn me 
out a locomotive of such a weight and pattern, to 
draw such a train, and to run a certain number of 
miles per hour ; " and the locomotive builder, by 
putting iron and wood and brass together into a 
certain form, and by making his boiler of a given 
pattern, and adjusting his wheels and valves and 
levers in a certain way, can turn out precisely such 
an engine. Put it on the rails and it will do ex- 
actly the work required of it, and it can do no 
other. And many popular notions of education 
are just about as mechanical. 'Turn my boy into 
an engineer," the father says ; or " Turn me into an 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. II 

engineer," the young man says himself ; " I don't 
care for your poetry, or your philosophy, or your 
history ; I want to know how to lay out railroads 
and build bridges." And if the young man were 
only a heap of iron bars, a lot of castings, a boiler, 
and a set of wheels, and an engineer were noth- 
ing but these put together in a certain shape, we 
could proceed as the locomotive builder does ; and, 
by joining the several fragmentary parts which 
constitute the raw material of the young man, 
could turn him out shaped into the chemical pat- 
tern, or the architect or engineering pattern. It 
is certainly true that when you come here you are 
the raw material out of which chemists, engineers, 
and the like, are to be made ; and pretty raw mate- 
rial some of you are on your first arrival, as no 
doubt you are quite ready to acknowledge. But 
the difficulty is that the process of putting you 
together is anything but a mechanical one, and 
the rules of it are quite other than mechanical 
rules. It is not ascertaining the breaking weight 
of intellectual rods, and the pressure to the square 
inch of spiritual boilers ; the material given is not 
a heap of wood and iron which has simply to be 
put in shape and then put together. It is a ques- 
tion of forming and shaping minds, and that is not 



12 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

2l mechanical question at all. It is a question of 
growth. 

Education is the process of developing mind ; and 
the development of mind is to be compared to the 
growth of a tree rather than to the putting together 
of a building or a machine. Now the growth of a 
tree, and much more the growth of a mind, is a far 
more mysterious process than the building of an 
engine. You can, to be sure, mechanically twist 
and bend a tree, and make it grow into an artificial 
shape, and so you can to a certain extent forcibly 
twist and bend minds into abnormal patterns ; but 
what you want of a tree is that it shall grow healthy 
and symmetrical and strong, and bear abundant fruit 
of the kind nature intended, and that is what you 
want also of a mind. And your problem is not to 
put the parts of a mind together. The mind is a 
living thing ; all you can do is to put it in a favor- 
able situation, give it plenty of healthful nourish- 
ment, and let it grow. And the important point is 
in regard to this nourishment. Now it is invari- 
ably found that neither animals nor human beings 
thrive on one kind of food ; and what is true of the 
body is equally true of the mind. It will not de- 
velop or grow strong on one kind of intellectual 
food. As no one kind of physical food contains all 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 13 

the elements necessary to constitute a healthy body, 
so no one study or set of studies contains all the 
elements that constitute a healthy mind ; and a 
man's mind will starve on mathematics or gram- 
mar as a dog starves when fed on sugar, though 
perhaps you may think the comparison not a very 
apt one. 

The question of food is the capital question in 
all education. Now I suppose it will sound very 
absurd to you if I say — to put the case as para- 
doxically as I can ; — that it is very important for 
an engineer, as a part of his professional education, 
to read Shakspeare and the English poets. There 
is certainly little about locomotives in them, and 
bridges are not there treated from an engineering 
point of view. Nevertheless, I am prepared to say 
that, as between the engineer who has learned to 
read Shakspeare and the engineer who has not, it 
is safe to maintain that, other things being equal, 
the former will surely be the better engineer. I 
say " other things being equal." I do not say he 
should neglect or slight his engineering studies in 
order to read Shakspeare. But as between two 
men, both knowing engineering, but one knowing 
nothing else while the other knows much besides, 
the latter will be the better, because while the one 



14 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

is only an engineer the other may be said to be 
a man engineering. And accordingly an eminent 
civil engineer once said to me : " Do not train 
your young men into mere engineers. I can hire 
plenty of professional knowledge at any time, but 
what I cannot find is the men I need to do profes- 
sional work." 

Do not suppose that I would have you slight 
your professional knowledge, or do your profes- 
sional work here any less than as perfectly as you 
can. This institution aims chiefly at giving you 
facilities for that, facilities which you cannot else- 
where find and will not have at your command 
again ; while, on the other hand, it is quite true 
that many general studies may be as well pursued 
in other places and at other times. Moreover, it is 
here that you must learn, if you ever do, how to 
study anything, by submitting to the rigorous 
system of mental discipline marked out by your 
mathematical and scientific studies. Through such 
discipline you will become possessed of that with- 
out which success is impossible, — a mind strength- 
ened by systematic exercise, and prepared to apply 
itself vigorously in any direction. I do not know 
of any way of acquiring such vigor except by 
strenuous application to some systematic course ; 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 15 

and I would be the last to recommend to you what 
is called the " elective system," — of sitting down as 
it were to a sort of intellectual restaurant-table and 
making up a> meal of all sorts of ingredients, and 
more especially the sweet ones. Such an educa- 
tion, if it can be called one, will be pretty sure to 
lead to intellectual feebleness and mental dyspepsia ; 
but indeed it is not education at all. 

For human knowledge is not a disorderly and 
incoherent mass, from which you can take as much 
as suits the pleasure of the moment, when and how 
you choose. It is an orderly and systematic whole ; 
and, whether we acquire much or little, if what we 
acquire is to serve any true purpose, either of util- 
ity or discipline, the main question in regard to it 
is the question of order and method. So that 
teachers seem to me to abdicate one of their chief 
functions who exercise no authority as to the selec- 
tion of their pupils' studies, but simply say: " Here 
is our table ; take a seat and choose your dishes, 
and fall to." How can mere youthful appetite, or 
the crude notions they may have . respecting the 
relative value of different kinds of intellectual nu- 
triment, direct young men at the very outset of 
their course to the right material ? 

Beyond liberty of choosing between a certain 



1 6 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

number of courses, 1 we do not, therefore, leave to 
you the question what studies you shall pursue. 
Last year your studies were the same for all ; this 
year, your department Once chosen, the studies that 
shall make up your course are definitely determined 
for you. In regard to most of them the selection 
depends on the requirements of the particular pro- 
fession or branch of the profession you have in 
view. The professional studies of the chemist 
must differ greatly from those of the architect, and 
these again, though in a less degree, from those 
of the engineer ; while the professional wants of 
the mining, will differ to a considerable extent from 
those of the civil, or those of the mechanical, en- 
gineer. But while the professional element in these 
and the other courses varies, there are certain in- 
gredients common to all, and these are of two 
kinds. First, there is the element of general math- 
ematical and scientific knowledge, — and by science 
I here mean physical science, — without which there 
can be no professional training at all for the pur- 
suits in life which you propose to follow ; but, sec- 
ondly, the necessity is laid upon all alike to give a 
certain amount of time and attention to studies 
which lie outside the domain of physical science 

1 At present fifteen in number. 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 1J 

altogether. I am careful to avoid the term "non- 
scientific studies," because I consider it a flagrant 
abuse of language to employ a phrase which im- 
plies that there are no sciences except the physical 
sciences. 

Now as to that element of general training in 
mathematical and physical science which is com- 
mon to all the courses, there can be no question 
as to the propriety and necessity of requiring it, 
because it is the foundation on which the whole 
structure of your professional education must rest. 
And accordingly I suppose no one is inclined to 
complain of the elaborate and perhaps tedious 
mathematical drill he has been subjected to dur- 
ing the past year, or to refuse to make the effort the 
higher part of it will require which lies before him 
during the present year. Its necessity and impor- 
tance are too obvious for question. It is the foun- 
dation of the professional superstructure ; and the 
man who cannot master it cannot expect to suc- 
ceed in the callings to the doors of which it is the 
only key. But in regard to that other general ele- 
ment, taken not from physical but from ethical and 
historical science, which you will also find in all 
your courses, there may be a doubt. Why, to go 
back to the question with which I began, should it 



1 8 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

be required in such a school as this ? Why, if such 
studies are taught at all/should it not be left to the 
taste of the individual student whether he will pur- 
sue them ? Why should attendance on such les- 
sons be rigorously exacted of every candidate for 
a degree ? I answer that these general studies, if 
you are to have a real education, are just as much 
prescribed by the nature of things as your pro- 
fessional studies. If you need a certain kind of 
knowledge to make you engineers, you also need 
a certain kind of knowledge to make you men; and 
it lies as little within your choice to neglect the 
one as the other. Perhaps it may be said/ even 
looking at the matter from a professional point of 
view, that the man with a moderate knowledge of 
engineering and a good knowledge of all that goes 
to make a man will, in the long run, succeed better 
than he who, the more he is of an engineer the 
less he is of a man ; for the latter is not so much 
an engineer as an animated engineering tool. It 
takes a man even to build a bridge. 

Now I would describe the ethical, or historical, 
or literary studies — there is some difficulty in find- 
ing for them a comprehensive and exactly suitable 
name — which belong to my department as those 
studies which go directly to the making of you into 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 19 

men, just as your technical studies are those which 
go directly to the making of you into engineers. 
I say directly, because all good study tends to make 
men of you, and no study more in its way than the 
strenuous pursuit of truth by the rigorous methods 
of inductive science, though its ethical influence 
may be an indirect one. Nevertheless, there are 
two realms of knowledge, the complements of each 
other, — the realm of material and the realm of spir- 
itual and ethical truth ; the realm of matter and the 
realm of mind. I speak in accordance with the 
philosophy in which I myself believe, and which 
leads me to distinguish, not to confound them 
together. I do not believe that the upshot of 
mental philosophy is the doctrine that " the brain 
secretes thought as the liver secretes bile," or that 
the whole science of man can be written out in 
terms of matter and motion, or that psychology is 
a subordinate branch of physiology. I shall try to 
make you look therefore upon the studies which I 
teach as belonging to a quite independent depart- 
ment of human thought, entirely beyond the con- 
trol of those physical sciences which, as technical 
students, you are here pursuing, however much 
light — and it is a great deal — they may be able 
to borrow from them. The question is therefore 



^20 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

on what grounds you, as technical students, should 
be compelled to pay any attention to them. 

It is a question I have already answered in say- 
ing that the studies which really educate form a 
system, not an " elective " chaos, and that it is our 
wish, so far as our means and opportunities allow, 
to educate you. It is true that we can do this only 
very imperfectly at present, through the imperfec- 
tion of your school preparation. It is safe to say 
that the larger number of you have come here 
from high schools and academies where the only 
subjects that were thoroughly taught were the 
Latin and Greek languages, or rather the Latin 
and Greek grammars ; and as you were not in 
the small minority who were preparing for college, 
the only preparation given you for admission here 
was that amount of elementary mathematics which 
is absolutely required, plus a certain amount, greater 
or less, of general information and general reading. 
That sound elementary knowledge of physical and 
natural science, which, as young men of eighteen, 
you should have acquired as the natural accom- 
paniment of your school study of abstract mathe- 
matics, you have, through no fault of your own, 
but through the pernicious influence of our college 
system upon our schools, had no opportunity to 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 21 

acquire ; and when you entered our school last year 
you labored under the serious disadvantage, as stu- 
dents of physical science, of having to make a be- 
lated beginning of those very studies which it is 
your principal object here to pursue. The years 
of boyhood have been lost to you, the very years 
when curiosity is most active, and your powers of 
observation should have been trained. I do not 
pretend to underrate this disadvantage, for it is a 
very serious one. It not only makes the beginning 
of the study of physical science unnaturally diffi- 
cult, but in order to make up arrears it will compel 
you, while you are with us, to devote a dispropor- 
tionate amount of time and effort to the profes- 
sional side of your education, and thus starve the 
equally important general side. It dislocates the 
natural order of studies ; and the habits of observa- 
tion and reasoning which would easily have been 
acquired under good elementary scientific training 
at school, and which, by the time you arrive here, 1 
should have been a part of the furniture of your 
minds, and the empirical knowledge of a large body 
of facts respecting the world of matter in which 
you have been living with eyes, as it were, closed, — 
all this, which ought to form a part of the alphabet 

1 The average age of entrance is seventeen to eighteen. 



22 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

of school education, you have painfully, because 
belatedly, to acquire for the first time here. That 
you succeed so well is greatly to the credit of your 
patience ; and I am sure that it will be an encour- 
agement to you to persevere to know that some of 
the greatest obstacles you find in your course of 
study at a school like this arise not from any natu- 
ral difficulties in the course itself, nor yet from any 
defect or incapacity in your own minds, but solely 
from the wretched school system under which we 
all suffer, which taught you little of what you most 
needed to know, and taught you that little ill. And 
I dwell upon these matters intentionally here, be- 
cause you have arrived at an age when it becomes 
an essential part of your education to think about 
your education. No one of you any longer thinks 
as a child or can be taught as a child, but as a man 
each must take the conduct of his "mind more or 
less into his own keeping ; and nothing can be more 
wholesome for him than to learn to discriminate, 
among the obstacles that lie in his path, between 
those which arise from his own deficiencies of 
power or will, and those which have arisen from 
defects of outward circumstance and opportunity. 1 

1 The elective system carried to the extreme to which it is car- 
ried in some of our colleges, and notably at Harvard, is bad 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 23 

Let me return from this digression to the ques- 
tion why you should study History. This question 
can hardly be answered till we know what History 
really is. Let us try to get at that by examining a 
little some of the notions I have imagined you at 

enough; but when it is combined, as it now is, with the require- 
ment of a preparation for admission in Latin and Greek gram- 
mar, even more rigorous than when the college course was 
composed chiefly of classical studies, this combination of all that 
was worst in the old system with all that is extravagant in the new 
becomes almost grotesque in its absurdity. Granting the utmost 
that the advocates of classical education claim, a sound view of 
the true order of studies, it seems to me, would reserve much of 
this philology for a later period in the boy's course ; for college, 
and not for school instruction. The system exercises a disastrous 
influence upon our schools by preventing the establishment of 
a rational course of study in them. For the attention of the 
principal teacher must more than ever be engrossed by the college 
preparation of a mere handful of his pupils ; which itself be- 
comes, nevertheless, more than ever a mere cram, because it is 
well understood that Latin and Greek can be thrown overboard 
almost as soon as the college doors are entered. The obstinate 
refusal to allow of an alternative for Greek in the college entrance 
examination, and thus establish in the schools a rational prepara- 
tion for the college elective system shows how little faith the ad- 
vocates of the classics have in their own system, when they think 
it necessary thus artificially to protect it. The idleness and dis- 
sipation which are the opprobrium of some of our older colleges 
are largely the preventable reaction of boys from whom the re- 
straint of an artificial and antiquated school cram has been sud- 
denly removed, and who are left to run wild without any genuine 
mental training, and with unlimited opportunity for the gratifica- 
tion of their appetites and passions. 



24 HIS TOR Y A ND THE S TUB Y OF HIS TOR Y. 

present to hold respecting it. " Edward II. was 
born in the year 1284, and came to the throne in 
1307. He was succeeded by Edward III. in 1327, 
who reigned fifty years. The Battle of Poictiers 
was fought in 1356, and many of the nobility of 
France were slain, as well as a multitude of com- 
mon soldiers." Of such material are school com- 
pendiums composed. You do not like it ; and the 
question is, why should you like it ? "Of what con- 
sequence is it to me," you say, "that an individual of 
whom I have no definite conception whatever came 
into the world in a certain year of which I really 
know nothing, and sat down upon a throne in an- 
other year of which I know as little ? The man is 
dead, and the years long gone by; and if I fill my 
memory full of such facts, what does it signify ? 
The facts, if they are of significance to anybody, 
are there in the books, and can always be referred 
to. Why should I load my mind with them ? That 
a battle was fought in a certain year, and a certain, 
number of men were killed, is apparently an event 
of-no more importance to me than that a given 
number of oxen were slaughtered last week at 
Brighton. Indeed, the latter fact is rather the 
more important of the two, because it is connected 
with the present price of beef." 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 2$ 

I quite admit the force of the objection and the 
uselessness of such so-called study, — only such 
study is not the study of History. Let us suppose 
that you have got painfully into your memories, in 
their proper order, all the kings of England and of 
Europe, and all the battles, and the date of Magna 
Charta and the Reformation, and all the rest of the 
compendium. You have no more got History than 
a man has got a house who has simply put up the 
frame of it. It is as if one should try to keep him- 
self from the rain by putting up the skeleton of an 
umbrella. Schools that I have known did nothing 
but turn out their pupils equipped with an assort- 
ment of just such protectors from the rain of igno- 
rance. But, unlike material framework, such edu- 
cational framework will not even hold together, but 
tumbles to pieces as fast as it is constructed, except 
in the case of that very stupid class of mortals who 
in lieu of a mind have only a memory. Yet this mis- 
taking of Chronology for History, this articulating 
of dry bones and substituting of skeletons for life, 
used to be, and I suppose continues to be, one of the 
commonest errors of school education. Students 
often say to me : " I have tried to learn History, 
but I have no memory for it," — as if History were 
a sort of multiplication-table. If I were paradoxi- 



26 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

cally inclined I should be tempted to say: "The 
less memory you have the better ; if you have no 
memory perhaps some day you will understand 
History." But I suppose that would be going too 
far, as there is a certain convenience in remember- 
ing a date here and there. It saves you a reference 
to your chronological table which may not always 
be at hand. 

But now another objector may say: "I never 
committed the error of mistaking Chronology for 
History. I read and enjoy the spirited narrative 
of interesting Histories, — Prescott and Motley 
and Froude and Macaulay. The personages of 
the past are very real to me for the time being, — 
Ferdinand and Alva and Queen Bess and William 
of Orange, and all the rest. I seem to see them 
as they, lived and moved, and take part as I read 
in the stirring action, but somehow there seems 
no result of genuine knowledge. The scenes pass 
before me as I read like a drama on the stage ; 
like the imaginary scenes of the historical novelist. 
Indeed the latter are the more vivid of the two ; 
and if this is historical study I do not quite see 
why I have not a right to prefer Scott to Froude 
and Macaulay." And if costume constitutes His- 
tory, as would seem to be the view of the advocates 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 27 

of the picturesque method, one does not see why 
the objector is not right, and why preference should 
not be given to the romancer. It matters little, if 
all we want to do is to realize a picture, whether 
the figures of knights and kings and ladies and 
peasants are mere creations of the poet's brain, 
or once had a real existence. Sir Walter's per- 
sonages are far more true to this kind of reality 
than the lay figures of many a historian. Certainly 
Scott's heroes did not actually live, and his events 
did not actually happen ; but even where costume 
and chronology are so skilfully combined that the 
picturesque historian rivals the historical novelist 
in the vividness of his effects, we are not much bet- 
ter off in point of real knowledge. If the pictu- 
resque historian is master of his trade we have now 
the vivid scenes plus the conviction that they, or 
something- like them, did actually happen, — the 
costumes along with the belief that real men and 
women once wore them ; but it seems to me that 
we are almost as far as ever from our true aim. 
The historian's characters are only one grain more 
real, his scenes only one grain less fleeting, than 
the novelist's ; and the reading of History must 
still be classed as an entertainment rather than a 
study. 



28 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

To the seeker after real knowledge the objection 
to both these methods seems valid, that real knowl- 
edge is not attained. Empty chronology is not 
matter of real knowledge, even if it were a table 
of all the events that ever happened ; and, on the 
other hand, buff jerkins and swords, and hats and 
feathers, brought ever so vividly before the imagi- 
nation, do not constitute knowledge ; if they did, 
the theatre would be the best of schools. Histori- 
cal knowledge is still to seek ; and perhaps to find 
it we had better drop the adjective and ask, What 
is knowledge ? In other words, What is science ? 
For scire means to know; and if History is matter 
of knowledge, History must be a part of science. 
What, then, is historical science ? The question 
can perhaps best be answered here by first ask- 
ing, What is physical science? and then noting the 
differences, if any, between physical and historical 
science. 

What, then, is it which you are studying here 
under the name of Physical Science ? It must 
already have become evident to you that it is the 
study, not so much of facts as of laws, — of facts 
not for themselves, but only in order to arrive at a 
knowledge of the laws that govern them. As stu- 
dents of chemistry, you are not engaged in merely 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 29 

combining simple substances into new compounds, 
and then labelling these with uncouth and unpro- 
nounceable names. You are endeavoring by watch- 
ing the behavior of these compounds to arrive at 
the general laws which govern their combination. 
As physicists, you would be involved in a bewilder- 
ing maze of indescribable phenomena, if at every 
step you did not discover laws that regulate their 
appearance. A botanist is not a labeller of dried 
herbs, or a naturalist a bottler of specimens and an 
articulator of bones. Both are seekers after the 
laws of vital growth ; and their dried herbs, and 
their bones and specimens, are of no value except 
as they help them in that quest. 

Is History then governed by Law ? Certainly 
there are those who maintain that it is not ; and to 
them the subject can never become matter of real 
study or a real instrument of education, but must 
remain the mere amusement of idle hours, or at 
best matter of information only. To see men and 
women going aimlessly to and fro upon the earth, 
falling into all sorts of scrapes and meeting with 
all sorts of adventures, kings upon their thrones, 
great warriors" leading their thousands to destruc- 
tion, lords in their castles, and peasants in their 
huts, — it is all very entertaining, — a sort of gigan- 



30 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

tic peep-show ; but if it is all hap-hazard where is 
the profit ? Should we not reserve it for the amuse- 
ment of our leisure after the serious work of educa- 
tion is done ? And if this is all I certainly think 
we should. 

But this view, it seems to me, is much on a par 
with that theory of natural science which would 
make out the botanist to be nothing but a labeller 
of herbs, and the naturalist a bottler of specimens 
and an articulator of bones. To turn History into 
a genuine study we must be persuaded that there 
is a counterpart to real physical science, and that is 
ethical science. Over against the science of mat- 
ter there stands the science of man ; and the two 
make up the domain of knowledge. And in the 
one, as in the other, it is not the mere accumula- 
tion of facts that constitutes knowledge, but the 
arrival through the observation of facts at. a knowl- 
edge of the laws that govern them. Man and his 
dwelling-place, — these are the only two possible 
subjects of study ; though we shall not pursue our 
studies far, as I believe, before we find that his 
temporal and material dwelling-place is an alto- 
gether too strait abode to contain his spirit. But 
place and time are where we must begin our study, 
because that is where we are. History, then, as a 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 31 

study can only be the attempt to ascertain through 
the record of past events the laws that govern the 
actions of man in time ; and it is important to re- 
member that from this point of view the events 
of yesterday, or even of the past moment, are as 
much matter of History as the events of a thou- 
sand years ago, and may be of infinitely greater 
scientific importance. 



32 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 



II. 



And now a question arises. If the doings of 
men, equally with the phenomena of nature, are 
governed by law, — if History is a science, — is it 
one of the physical sciences ? Are the laws that 
govern it only a part of those laws that govern 
the phenomena of the physical universe ? The 
tendency at present, or rather I might say the 
tendency most apparent on the surface at pres- 
ent, is to answer this question in the affirmative. 
The philosophies of History that are most in vogue 
are materialistic philosophies. I shall have more 
to say of this hereafter; but, without stopping to 
argue the question here, I will merely repeat that 
such is not my own view. I do not believe it pos- 
sible to interpret the phenomena of human activity 
in terms of matter and motion. I believe that new 
factors enter into the problem of human history 
that forever separate it from the problem of natural 
history, however much the two studies may have to 
borrow from each other. 

It is idle to set the claims of one class of studies 
in antagonism to the other ; and the greater part of 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 33 

the arguments employed in the controversy, which 
is constantly going on, between the advocates of 
what is called a classic ,1 and the defenders of 
what is called a scientific education seem to me 
utterly futile and beside the mark. It might even 
be said that there is properly no such thing as a 
classical, as distinguished from a scientific, edu- 
cation ; or a scientific, as distinguished from a 
classical, since a training exclusively scientific or 
exclusively literary is infallibly one-sided, and there- 
fore not a liberal education at all. The student 
who learns ever so completely the laws of matter, 
but knows nothing of the laws of mind, is no more 
to be called educated than he who knowing all His- 
tory, which is the record of man's doings, and all 
Literature, which is the record of his thoughts, has 
yet been left in childish ignorance respecting the 
laws that govern the phenomena of the universe 
he inhabits. 1 The philosophy of the one will as 
surely degenerate into an empty scholasticism as 
the science of the other will turn out a shallow 
materialism. Each side of knowledge is barren 
and imperfect without the other. 

1 For a most extraordinary picture of the state of the- higher 
English education in this respect twenty years ago, I refer the 
reader to the appendix to my " Classical and Scientific Studies, and 

3 



34 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

As this is a subject we are hearing much about 
just now, and as you are students in that form of 
education which, I think, is rapidly acquiring for 
itself a claim to the title of the liberal education 
par excellence of the present day, let me pause here 
and make a few further remarks upon it. 

The practical issues in what is called the classi- 
cal controversy seem to me to be two, both easily 
decided when argued on their own merits. The 
first is, whether the training in Latin and Greek 
grammar of the classical schools is a good prepa- 
ration for that form of the higher education whose 
preponderating elements are to be drawn from phys- 
ical science. And I should answer this question un- 
hesitatingly in the negative, and say that no prepa- 
ration could well be worse ; because, confining, as it 
does, the pupil's whole attention to dead words, it 
deprives him of that preparatory training of the 
senses and the observing powers, and the oppor- 
tunity for the early formation of habits of induc- 
tive reasoning from observation, which are essential 
foundations for after success in the study of phy- 
sical science. I do not for a moment dispute the 
necessity for elementary language-training also; 

the Great Schools of England" (Cambridge, 1865), containing the 
evidence drawn from an elaborate Parliamentary Report. 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 35 

but here the other question arises, whether, since 
the appearance with all their wealth of material 
of the literatures of modern Europe, and since 
the facilities afforded by the modern science of 
comparative philology have so completely changed 
the aspect of the study of modern languages, the 
languages and literatures of Greece and Rome, 
whatever be their absolute merits, — and no one 
who knows anything about them will be inclined 
to undervalue them, — can ever again stand in 
.precisely the same relation, even to an education 
whose preponderating elements are to be literary, 
in which they stood when these two languages 
were the only keys of thought and the only de- 
positaries of knowledge. The answer here must 
surely be also in the negative, although a distinc- 
tion must be made between the positions of the 
two classical tongues. Neither a sound literary 
nor a sound scientific education scheme can be 
planned, it seems to me, that should not include 
some knowledge, more or less extensive, of Latin, 
not only because it seems to furnish the best in- 
strument for that elementary grammatical train- 
ing which, as a mental exercise, is as essential an 
ingredient in a preparation for scientific as for 
literary studies, but because a good knowledge of 



36 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

Latin is necessary to the right study of English 
itself, and the very foundation for the study of the 
group of Romance languages, — - French, Spanish, 
Italian, — which are indeed but its modern dialects. 
But ' the case is very different with the really 
far richer and more valuable Greek. It is idle to 
call that any longer an essential element in either 
form of education, in the sense in which it might 
well have been called essential at the time of the 
Revival of Learning. I yield to none in my admi- 
ration for the perfection of the language or the 
beauty of its literature and its art. My own early 
education, such as it was, was exclusively classical ; 
and I have no disposition to join the ranks of the 
ignorant depredators of that most precious legacy 
of the past. But for the very reason that I value 
this study so much I want to see it dealt with as 
what it really has become, a high and very special 
form of literary training, to be reserved for those 
who have the leisure and the capacity for produc- 
ing the real results of that form of culture. When 
it is looked upon in this light we shall have, instead 
of the tribe of bunglers and smatterers, or mere 
verbal pedants and pedagogues, the real Greek 
scholars whom the present "classical system" does 
not produce. I will add that it seems to me more 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 2)7 

than probable that many of these real Grecians 
will in future be found among the other sex. 1 

It is all very well to talk about reading Greek 
literature in the original ; but it is not to one in 
ten thousand of the boys who are now forced to 
waste their time over it that the original ever be- 
comes half so good a vehicle of the meaning of a 
Greek author — even supposing that they so much 
as learn to want to know his meaning, a very im- 
probable supposition — as a good translation. Now 
the worst possible form of education is an abortive 
education, — one that misses its mark and has to fall 
back upon some mysterious " disciplinary " claim 
for its justification, — as if there were any true dis- 
cipline in failing to master a subject ! Because 
ancient Greece had a beautiful literature, it does not 
at all follow that a boy has got a good education by 
not learning how to read it. For most boys, what 
is called a classical education nowadays consists 

1 See, for instance, that interesting book, " The Myths of the 
Odyssey in Art and Literature," by Miss M. J. Harrison, of Girton 
College. London, 1882, of which the London " Spectator " says that 
it " vindicates for her a considerable place among the scholars of 
the day; " and the "Athenaeum" declares that " it is only just to say 
that we are not acquainted with any book produced by any man at 
either university which does so much for the popular knowledge 
of ancient art as this work by a student from one of the Cambridge 
colleges for women." 



38 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

in not learning how to read, much less how to enjoy 
reading, the Latin and Greek classics, and in being 
prevented thereby from really learning anything 
else, except perhaps base-ball and lawn-tennis. 

In truth, it is always vain to attempt to resusci- 
tate systems which the world has outgrown and 
passed by. The Greek and Roman classics were 
the precious instruments whereby the intellect of 
Europe was roused from the sleep of the Middle 
Ages ; but to attempt to base all higher education 
any longer upon their study is as idle as it would 
be to try to revive the scholastic philosophy, or to 
make the Romish Church the religious exponent 
of modern civilization. The world's intellectual 
atmosphere has changed. 1 

1 The true secret of this desperate clinging to an obsolete form 
of education is often, as it seems to me, sectarian jealousy of mod- 
ern physical science. I say sectarian, not religious, because there 
is no real antagonism between true science and true religion, 
though much between true science and obsolete creeds. It is 
curious to see how completely classical education, which was the 
radicalism of the Renaissance, has taken the place of the old 
scholastic philosophy which it superseded, as the modern strong- 
hold of conservatism. "There is a new language, my children," 
said a monkish preacher of the fifteenth century, " called Greek. I 
bid you beware of it. It is the invention of the devil, and will lead 
you straight to perdition." " This new science," say the sectarian 
religionists of our day, " is wicked, godless, materialistic ; and will 
take you straight out of our church, and make belief in our ancient 
and venerable creeds impossible." The latter part of the charge 
is often as true as the first is false and unfounded. 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 39 

I think you may well congratulate yourselves 
that you have chosen the liberal education of the 
nineteenth, instead of that of the sixteenth century. 
Of the dreariness, the emptiness, the abortiveness, 
the total absence of all fruitful result, whether of 
real culture or real knowledge, of a great part of 
what goes by the name of classical education, only 
those can judge who have looked into the subject 
carefully. For one real classical scholar that is 
made, the education of a hundred promising boys 
has to be ruined or perverted ; till it has come to be 
almost the accepted theory that an old-fashioned 
college is a place of idleness where the majority 
cannot be expected to do otherwise than spend 
their time in rowing and athletics, if not worse ; or 
else, as at Oxford and Cambridge, in cramming for 
competitive examinations in the old lines of study, 
because these are carefully protected by the posses- 
sion of the monopoly of money prizes. At the old- 
est of our own colleges the attempt to maintain 
this monopoly has been abandoned after the exac- 
tion of a compulsory cram for admission, a cram 
which has become all the more empty and unmean- 
ing now that a way of escape is provided almost 
with the opening of the college doors. 

The freshness, the vigor, the fruitfulness in re- 



40 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

suits of the new education, as contrasted with the 
deadness of the old, are proof, if any were wanting, 
that the former is the new birth of the new times. 
Modern physical science and its methods stand in 
the same relation, as an educating instrumentality, 
to the nineteenth century in which the newly found 
literatures of Greece and Rome stood to the six- 
teenth. You might as well try to put baggage- 
wagons in place of railways again, as declare that 
the ancient classics shall forever continue to hold 
the place they once held as the awakeners of the 
mind of Europe. Their perennial value will never 
be lost. Whatever of truth or of beauty they hold 
will maintain its influence. They did not them- 
selves come to destroy but to fulfil. Nothing of 
the truth it contained was lost out of the mediaeval 
scholasticism which they superseded ; and now that 
they are themselvesfast being superseded their ab- 
solute value will remain, and we need not fear that 
we shall ever be without real classical scholars to 
maintain and proclaim it. But the great tide of 
thought can no longer be contained in such nar- 
row limits. The world of education can no longer 
be ruled by classical scholars, and much less by 
classical pedagogues. 

But now I do not wish to conceal my belief that 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 41 

the new education has its own dangers which are 
all the greater because of its present imperfect 
stage of development. The greatest of these dan- 
gers is that it shall itself become one-sided, and 
that in its eager pursuit of this new Science, which 
is so transforming the whole world of thought, it 
shall neglect and despise those Uteres humaniores, of 
which the ancient classics have heretofore stood as 
the representatives. To say that the ancient clas- 
sics can no longer stand as the educational represen- 
tatives, even of Literature, or to say that literary 
studies in any form can no longer, since the birth of 
modern Science, constitute the sole foundation of 
modern education, is only to state what is becoming 
obvious to all thinkers. But to rush to the conclu- 
sion that in education Science can supersede Lit- 
erature, or that literary studies can be neglected, 
because of the discredit which the barrenness of the 
obsolescent classical system has thrown upon them, 
is to make the gravest of educational blunders, but 
one which I fear too many so-called "practical" men 
are now making. To turn scientific education into 
mere technical training is to compromise the new 
education at the very outset, and to give an easy 
victory to its opponents. And it is for this reason, 
to return from this long, but I hope not unprofit- 



42 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

able digression, that I am so anxious to convince you 
of the vastness and weightiness of historical studies, 
even at the expense of some feeling of discourage- 
ment on your part at the thought of how little, 
under the circumstances in which you are placed, 
you can do about them. Certainly you can do but 
little here in the way of mastering them ; but to 
learn something of right methods of study will be 
much, and to learn to appreciate such studies at 
their true value will be more. 

Remember, I am not speaking of the barren 
school-books of chronology which may have dis- 
gusted you in your childhood, nor yet of the 
burl-jerkin business which, in the intellectual at- 
mosphere in which you live, you can hardly bring 
yourselves to look upon as a branch of serious 
study. 1 I am speaking of History considered as a 
science. Now, inasmuch as this is an attempt to 
interpret human life and human character by the 
record, however imperfect, of men's actions and 

1 To those who urge that we must make the teaching of History 
interesting by making it always picturesque and romantic, Pro- 
fessor Seeley answers : " Make History interesting indeed ! I can- 
not make History more interesting than it is, except by falsifying it. 
And therefore when I meet a person who does not find History 
interesting, it does not occur to me to alter History, — I try to 
alter him" — Expa?tsiojz of England, p. 308. 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 43 

their thoughts, I call it the most perplexed and 
complicated and difficult of all studies, one that 
draws upon all the resources of Literature and 
Philosophy, of Art and Science, to interpret it 
rightly. Literature is properly the written record 
of man's thought ; History the story of that thought 
as it has developed into action ; and for our present 
purpose the line between the two is not to be drawn 
very narrowly. A poem may prove the most pre- 
cious of historical documents, though it may not 
contain the record of a single real occurrence ; and 
often the wars and battles, and the doings of kings 
and statesmen, which fill the pages of the historian, 
will be a mere chaos of confusion till in the pages 
of the thinkers, that is to say, in Literature, you 
get a clew to it all in the shape of the ideas that 
were working themselves out in all that confused 
action. 

History, then, is, properly speaking, the story of 
men's thoughts as they have developed into action ; 
and to say that History is a science is to say that 
the evolution of these thoughts is subject to law, 
and therefore capable of being partially understood ; 
and to say that the science of History is not one of 
the physical sciences is to say that the laws that 
govern the evolution of human thought, and so give 



44 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

rise to social and political action, are other and dif- 
ferent, at least in part, from the laws that govern 
the evolution of the world of matter. And all this 
I believe to be true. "And if it be," you say, "you 
put before us, in the shape of History and Litera- 
ture, two very formidable subjects ; and what can 
we possibly do about them ; or how can we, with 
the little fragment of time which is all we can save 
from our technical studies, do anything here about 
them that shall be worth doing ? " Why, cer- 
tainly very little, I admit, in comparison with the 
magnitude and difficulty and the importance, to 
you as well as to all other students, of the sub- 
jects ; and all the less, because of those grave 
defects in your school education which I have al- 
ready noticed. If you had only brought with you 
that elementary knowledge of physical science with 
which good schools ought to equip young men of 
seventeen or eighteen, you could have afforded to 
give greater variety to your studies here, and I 
could venture to impose more work upon you than 
I shall dare to do now. Still something, indeed 
much, can be done, for you can be taught how to 
make a right, even if a belated, beginning. That 
need not take time. Or, when the study of details 
is impossible, you can survey the ground and learn 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 45 

how to study them, and thus prepare the way for 
after study, and this again need not take a great 
amount of time. 'And this will be what I shall 
chiefly aim at in my lessons ; not to teach you His- 
tory and Literature, for that is impossible, but to 
teach you how to study them so far as I know how 
myself. Moreover, though you will perhaps be 
surprised when I say it, you have really brought 
with you a better preparation for the study of His- 
tory and Literature than for the study of Physical 
Science. Owing to the badness of your schools, 
the great majority of you came here with your 
senses and your powers of observation' absolutely 
untrained, and, as the saying is, with your fingers 
all thumbs. You had never perhaps seen an ex- 
periment performed in a chemical or physical labo- 
ratory, much less performed one yourselves. You 
had never analyzed a plant, or studied the structure 
of insect or animal. Your knowledge of chemistry, 
physics, biology, was zero when it was not a minus 
quantity ; for some of you had perhaps, ^wlearned 
a little Physical Science by memorizing the pages 
of some school compendium. Am I extravagant 
in this statement ? If so, you shall correct me. 

Now certainly, on the other hand, nothing could 
be much worse than the answers most of you gave 



46 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

to the questions set you in your entrance-examina- 
tion papers in History, unless it was the answers 
to the questions set you in English Literature. 1 
And, for all that, I say that you brought with you 
a better preparation for the study of History and 
Literature than you brought for the study of 
Physics. For you had been living for seventeen 
or eighteen years. And to live, even if it is only 
to play base-ball, is, in a sense, the proper and the 
best of all preparations for studying History. And 
it was indirectly evident in many ways that you 
had thus accumulated a fund of intellectual capac- 
ity and general information which are none the 
less valuable for being unrepresentable, except very 
indirectly, in examination-papers. 

In all studies we must begin somewhere. It is 
the capital error of much teaching to begin any- 
where, that is to say, nowhere. It is as if the 
unhappy subject of it were pushed off from a bal- 



1 I could easily prove these assertions, but it would not be quite 
fair. The results, however, are no worse and not different from 
those which every college examiner could report in subjects that 
are badly taught or only crammed for examination in school. That 
our students are a very intelligent, and even an exceptionally capa- 
ble body of young men, is proved by the very remarkable record of 
the positions held by our graduates which is to be found in the 
appendix to our catalogue. 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 47 

loon and told to walk. Now this somewhere, this 
true point of departure, can be no other than those 
faculties and that amount of knowledge, be it more 
or less, which the pupil already possesses. As 
children, for instance, you were endowed from your 
very birth with five senses, which nature herself 
makes active from the very earliest moment in gath- 
ering a vast amount of miscellaneous but highly in- 
teresting information respecting the world of sights 
and sounds about you. Here is nature's point of 
departure, that somewhere from which all true 
education begins. But the pedant says no. He 
ignores all that, and taking the unhappy child up 
in his balloon pitches him out into an empty world 
of words, through which to tumble head-foremost 
during the greater part of his school life. No won- 
der that he falls to the ground — if he ever reaches 
it — in an exhausted condition, and has to inquire 
in some bewilderment, what is the net result of his 
aerial flight, and what sort of a world it is he has at 
last landed in. Do not suppose that I mean that 
this world of words is an unreal world. It is only 
unreal to him, and that through the perverse 
method of his introduction to it. Built up from 
the ground of solid knowledge of what words stand 
for, no structure would have been more enduring, 



48 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

for the world of words would then have become a 
world of true ideas, a world of realities, material 
and spiritual. But pedants must needs build their 
houses from the chimneys downwards. 

And to apply this to History, that king who in 
your school-book was but an unmeaning name, that 
date which was simply an unrememberable num- 
ber, were once realities; and it is the true object of 
historical study, not to remember the names, but to 
restore their reality ; if that is done the memory 
will take care of itself. That battle which to you 
was but as the slaughter of cattle, be sure had a 
meaning; and History asks, What did it determine? 
Now how can we restore that reality, how get at 
the meaning of the men and things long dead and 
gone almost to oblivion ? I can see but one hope- 
ful starting-point, and that is what we already know 
of ourselves and the life about us. More or less of 
this sort of knowledge we cannot help acquiring, 
because happily we do not depend for it upon 
pedants and their school-teaching, but get it by 
simply living. I can safely affirm that a class of 
young men of the average age of eighteen or nine- 
teen bring with them a considerable stock in trade 
of such knowledge and opinions and ideas, where- 
with to set up in business as students of History. 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 49 

It makes little difference that most of the opinions 
and ideas are probably wrong ; they are as good for 
the purpose as right ones, perhaps even better ; be- 
cause learning is the rectification of ideas, and we 
value no truth so highly as that which we have ac- 
quired by our own effort. The main point is that 
you should have in your heads ideas and not merely 
conjugations and declensions ; in the case of His- 
tory, say, thoughts of your own about the war of the 
Rebellion, or Gladstone and Bismarck, or Civil 
Service Reform, or the doings of disgraceful State 
governors, 1 or whatever else of historical matter 
cannot fail to have come to your notice through the 
mere process of living and reading the last leaf of 
the world's chronicles, the newspaper. For, as I 
said before, the events of yesterday or of the last 
hour are as much History as if they had happened 
a thousand years ago ; and with what hope can we 
undertake to penetrate the darkness which half con- 
ceals the past, if we see and understand nothing 
of what is taking place before our eyes ? 

Let us examine then a little into the nature of that 
knowledge of History which you already possess ; 
I do not mean how much you know of the names 

1 This was written in the year when a disreputable demagogue 
was Governor of Massachusetts. 



50 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

and dates, the battles and kings, of your school- 
books, — a knowledge which is probably worthless 
enough, — but that knowledge of yourselves and of 
the life round about you, which you have gathered 
through the mere process of living with your eyes 
open. You are members, whether you ever re- 
flected much about it or not, of a vast and com- 
plex society, which touches you at every point, 
regulates all your doings, and more than half makes 
you what you are. Where did it come from ? How 
did it grow up T Why is Massachusetts so unlike 
Patagonia ? Why are you not naked savages ? 
The origin of the very coat you wear is a prob- 
lem that stretches back into the dimness of an- 
tiquity. To give a complete account of the break- 
fast you ate this morning, and how it came to 
you, would require not a little knowledge of the 
history of civilization. Yonder church with its tall 
spire, why is it there ? Itself a mere pile of stone 
and mortar, what put it there ? What shaped it ? 
What does it stand for ? Yonder dome glittering in 
the sun, and the assembly underneath it, — why, it 
has taken ages of heroic effort and innumerable 
wars and battles to make that gathering possible. 
To know History is to understand the meaning of 
Boston State-House. Here is Boston itself, with its 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 5 I 

acres of houses, its paved streets, electric and gas 
lighted, its warehouses rilled with the products of 
all the earth, ships and steamships at its wharves, 
and crowds rushing in and out on its iron roads ; 
and a short two centuries ago it was a howling 
wilderness. What made Boston ? Where did it 
come from ? Why, at any rate out of the past ; and 
to know something of the forces that created it is 
to know History. Boston is no accident. It has 
grown to be what it is through the steady efforts of 
honest and laborious men to build it up, and against 
the efforts of all rogues and rascals and disrepu- 
table demagogues to pull it down. And the build- 
ers must have worked, consciously or unconsciously, 
upon some plan, as much in organizing its political 
and social system as in building its houses out of 
bricks. And they did not themselves wholly make 
that political and social system. It came to them 
largely out of the past, however they may have im- 
proved it ; and that again out of a remoter past, 
till you get clear back to the men of the bone-caves 
and the contemporaries of the mammoth. To trace 
things back is to study History ; and the point of 
departure must be what you know, be it much or 
little, of the result as it lies before you. 

Now of the result we call Boston there are two 



52 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

parts, a visible and an invisible one. The visible 
result is the Boston of bricks and mortar, of paved 
streets and warehouses, of steamships and railways. 
So far as it is visible, it is the subject of Physical 
Science. You can, as it were, bray it in a mortar, 
put it into your retorts and crucibles, reduce it to 
its primitive elements, and detect the forces that 
combine them. The geologist will give a good ac- 
count of the stones the church is built of, and the 
bricks that went to make the houses. The chemist 
shall analyze the food you eat, while the engineer is 
calculating the power that brought it to you. The 
forces that light the streets and bring water from 
the hills, the delicate mechanism that wove your 
coat, the power that takes you to and fro on the 
wings of the wind, — all visible and tangible Boston 
is the subject of those sciences which it is your 
chief business to study here. What these sciences 
cannot explain is invisible Boston, — the spiritual 
structure in which we live more truly than in houses 
made with hands ; the social structure of religion 
and morals, of law and government, of knowledge 
and education, and legal order and civilized custom, 
which surrounds us like an atmosphere, and in 
which we live and move and have our intellectual 
being. This it is which makes us what we are ; 






HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 53 

and it is because we are born into this spiritual 
dwelling that we are not as the men of the bone- 
caves. 

Now certainly we are on one side material be- 
ings, and as such, part of visible Boston, and there- 
fore it behooves us to know that well. f There is 
even no real knowledge of our spiritual selves and 
our spiritual surroundings, without such material 
knowledge as a starting-point. But I submit, that 
to stop with the material knowledge is not in any 
sense to be educated. It is to take the shell and 
leave the kernel. It is to repeat the error of the 
miser, and gather money for money's sake, and not 
for what it will exchange for. I might say that you 
become really educated only so far as the invisible 
Boston becomes the true reality. You will find 
there is great uncertainty about the existence of 
the visible bricks and stones, whether they are not 
in a certain sense an illusion. I am not sure that 
in your laboratories you will not reduce even these 
to invisible forces. To the eye of the man of sci- 
ence himself 

" The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve 
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind." 



54 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

To the real man of science himself there is no 
finality in the phenomena of the senses ; the real- 
ity is in the laws that underlie them. But though 
they may sometimes be the symbols, it is my con- 
viction that these laws of physical science can 
never be the substitutes for those laws of intellec- 
tual and moral life which constitute the science of 
History. 

Science is methodized knowledge. If there is 
an independent science of History, it must have its 
own method ; and unless there is, History is of no 
more value than an old almanac. Unless there were 
laws that governed the combination of chemical 
atoms, if your chemical experiment turned out one 
thing one day and another thing the next, there 
could be no chemistry. Men are not chemical 
atoms ; but unless their actions were also governed 
by some sort of calculable law, History would be 
only a gigantic chaos. And the first step in de- 
tecting these laws is, as in Physical Science, to 
classify. By classification the phenomena of Phy- 
sical Science are divided into manageable sections, 
as Chemistry, Physics, Biology, and the like ; and 
though Science is a unit, and there is the closest 
interdependence between all its branches, yet it 
is only by isolating different sets of phenomena 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 55 

by such subdivision that study becomes possible. 
Such a system of subdivision we must apply to the 
phenomena of human life ; though human life also 
is a whole, and these divisions must be to a great 
extent artificial, and matter of convenience only. 

Now the basis of such a classification is given 
in the various relations in which men stand to 
each other. History is the story of the rise and 
growth of human society ; and society is formed out 
of relations. If man were not a social creature 
he would have no history. Homer's Cyclops had 
no history. The history of Australian savages or 
Fiji Islanders for centuries can be written in very 
few words ; and the major part of the population of 
the globe have, as yet no history, for their relations 
to one another are few and unchangeable. Gener- 
ation after generation they have lived as their 
fathers lived before them. With a few, and with 
thus far but a few, of the races of mankind, and 
notably with the Aryan family, the case has been 
different. There was in them a principle of 
growth, a capacity for development and progress ; 
and it is the story of this development that consti- 
tutes History. To take first what is most obvious, 
consider the material progress of what we call a 
civilized nation. Look at England, with her farms 



56 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

and factories, her cities and palaces, her enormous 
wealth, her commerce and manufactures, her empire 
extending round the globe. It is easy to go back 
to a time when a few rude men landed on an island 
covered with forests, and, conquering men as rude as. 
themselves, began all that. They began with trust- 
ing themselves on the water in hollowed logs ; they 
cross oceans now in huge steamships; and the grad- 
ual growth of the steamship of ten thousand tons, 
out of the hollow log, is but a symbol of the growth 
of their civilization. To trace that growth, as well 
as the imperfect records of the past enable us to 
do it, is to write History ; and certainly the story 
of that steamship itself, the story of the rise and 
growth of those physical sciences which you come 
here to study, and of all the great practical inven- 
tions for improving man's material condition, which 
have flowed from them, forms no mean or unimpor- 
tant chapter in the history of human progress, 
though it is a chapter whose importance is often 
strangely overlooked by the professed historian. 
Civilization is something different from mere mate- 
rial progress, but it is based upon that. The pro- 
fessed historian has done scant justice to it, be- 
cause he has been too busy heretofore with other 
chapters, and chiefly with the chapter which deals 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. S7 

with the quarrels of men and nations ; and unques- 
tionably men have been busier in the past in de- 
stroying than in helping each other. A great 
deal of the history of the past is, necessarily occu- 
pied with the story of that grim process of natural 
selection whereby it has been appointed — we can- 
not tell why — that the best races should fight their 
way to the front by overpowering the feebler and 
inferior races. The modern doctrine of evolution, 
it seems to me, gives the only rational explanation 
of this predominant feature in the history of the 
past, as I shall try to show hereafter. Meantime, it 
is plain that we have at last arrived at a period 
when war no longer plays the leading part in the 
drama of human development, but the story of con- 
struction more and more takes the place of that of 
destruction ; and yet all along through the past, 
even clear back to the times when wars were little 
better than the fights of herds of wild buffaloes, that 
process of construction must have been slowly going 
on, the very outcome and result of the destruction 
that accompanied it. War itself is the stronger 
overpowering the weaker, the sweeping away of 
what is corrupt and decayed, the prevailing of that 
which in the end proves fittest to live, or how else 
can there have been any progress ? No doubt it 



58 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

has also meant the destruction, for the time being, 
of many a germ of progress in grim Hunnish inva- 
sions, and still more hideous Albigensian Crusades. 
It is the true task of History to trace the gradual 
and often interrupted steps of that progress, not to 
be the monotonous chronicle of the fighting that 
was only one of its incidents. How the institutions 
of civilization have grown out of the barbarism of 
primitive man : how the dwellers in the bone-caves, 
coevals of the mastodon and the mammoth in that 
dim past which makes the poor six thousand years 
of our mythological chronology seem but a moment, 
— how these built themselves houses, learned to till 
the ground, to tame as well as destroy their brute 
companions, to form themselves into societies, to or- 
ganize governments, and make themselves laws of 
right living ; how their first rude notions of a power 
above them slowly developed into religions, to be 
the more or less rational rule of their inner lives ; 
how ideas of property first arose, and out of these 
grew that vast and complicated network of mutual 
helpfulness we call trade and commerce, — all this 
added to that other story, that step by step accom- 
panies it, of the discovery of the laws that govern 
physical matter, and the finding out of material 
inventions, and the getting more and more the con- 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 59 

trol of the forces of nature, — the account of all this 
constitutes the vast and complicated subject we call 
History, the most difficult and the most interesting 
of studies, a study so comprehensive that there is 
no other that does not make it some contribution. 

It is a story so vast and complicated that the 
devotion of the longest lifetime would not begin 
to exhaust it. No one properly knows History or 
can know it ; why then should we trouble ourselves 
about it ? The question admits of various answers. 
I might say once for all, that we cannot help troub- 
ling ourselves about it ; that mere curiosity leads us 
to question the past, and try to learn where all we 
see about us came from. But if you ask why you, 
as students of Physical Science, should be obliged 
to study History, my answer would be as before, 
that you are here, if chiefly, yet not merely as stu- 
dents of Physical Science, but as seekers after one 
form of liberal education; and no form of liberal 
education can afford to omit the study of History. 
And to say that you are seeking one form of lib- 
eral education, is only to say in other words, that 
you want to train yourselves not merely into en- 
gineers, but also into men ; and no study has more 
to do with all that will tend to make you men than 
History. We find ourselves members of a social 



60 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

system" in which we have got to play men's parts, 
and to which we owe the highest duties. You do 
not escape your responsibilities as men, by turning 
yourselves into engineers. You are going to have 
relations to other things besides mines and bridges 
and railways. You can no more step out of the 
State than you can step out of your skin. You 
are part of the social organism ; and if you do not 
do your duty by it it will suffer. No matter how 
humble your function may seem, it is never really 
humble, because no other can perform it for you. 
This doctrine is above all others the very corner- 
stone of republicanism ; and the neglect of it brings 
upon us Tweed rings and disgraceful State gover- 
nors, and the possibility of the very overthrow of 
free institutions. And it is not in politics merely 
that this is true, but in every possible relation of 
life. In every relation in which you stand, you 
have a duty to do, and must somehow learn to do it. 
Now the study of History is the study of these very 
relations. You might call it the study of the en- 
gineering of life, where is spread out the record of 
all manner of experiments of living, the plans of 
all sorts of social structures men have raised, and 
why they stood or why they fell, and what lessons 
they transmitted to their successors, in the art of 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 6l 

building better. The ocean steamship is not much 
like the, hollow log, and yet the one grew out of the 
other ; and the difference between them is not 
greater than that between England and the tribe 
of rude wanderers who began England. 



62 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 



III. 



I have said that the true task and proper func- 
tion of historical science is to trace out the devel- 
opment of those spiritual and social relations which 
constitute us human and civilized beings. History 
is the story of the growth of civilization. Now 
these relations in which we stand, and which really 
constitute our humanity, — for a man out of relation 
to others can only be a brute and a savage, — ad- 
mit of an easy classification, and such a classifica- 
tion must form the basis of all systematic study 
of History. And first man feels, in whatever stage 
of intellectual development he may be found, that 
he stands in some relation to a supreme invisible 
creative power above him; and History shows that 
the greatest efforts he puts forth are controlled 
and directed by his sense of that relation, — strug- 
gles between competing ideas respecting it, where 
higher prevail over lower conceptions of the di- 
vine mystery of life and its relation to a higher 
one ; and so long as man is a spirit, and the 
true realities of life are its spiritual realities, how 
can this be otherwise ? The outward splendor 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 63 

of material civilization vanishes like a dream; 
Rome crumbles to ruin, and Nineveh becomes a 
howling wilderness, but man's spiritual progress is 
unbroken ; and the deepest, if the most perplex- 
ing chapter in its history, is the religious chapter. 
Even the fact that the bloodiest and bitterest wars 
ever waged have been religious wars, only shows 
that the religious principle is the profoundest in 
human nature. A nation or a society without a 
religion disintegrates and perishes. A religion, 
even though full of error, can make conquests, and 
organize polities, and create civilizations. Wher- 
ever we traverse the surface of History, we find that 
the vastest and most imposing monuments of man's 
creation are the monuments of his dead creeds. 
But though the creeds perish, the religious princi- 
ple never dies ; and the shallowest of all modern 
philosophies of History is that which reckons Re- 
ligion as marking only a transient phase in man's 
development, and which, after all, had to invent a 
so-called Religion of Humanity. 

By Religion I mean, of course, something more 
than creeds and ceremonies and churches. These 
are only the dress of Religion, the outward and 
changing forms in which the indestructible relig- 
ious sentiment embodies itself, — forms which must 



64 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

necessarily change as that sentiment frees itself 
from superstitious error, and develops into greater 
and greater clearness. Go where you will, from the 
lowest savages up to the representatives of the 
highest civilization, you find the religious senti- 
ment ; but nothing at first sight is so confusing as 
the strange and fantastic shapes it puts on, the 
whimsical follies it gives rise to. Taken by itself, 
the history of Religion shocks reason and violates 
common sense. The fiercest wars ever waged have 
been religious wars; the crudest persecutions relig- 
ious persecutions. In the name of Religion men 
have hanged, burned, tortured, scourged, and cruci- 
fied thousands and thousands of their fellow-men. 
There is no page of History blacker than that which 
records the story of pagan persecutions, of Saracen 
conquests, of Roman Catholic Inquisitions, and 
Albigensian Crusades, and Thirty Years Wars be- 
tween nations professing the gospel of peace and 
good will. And, on the other hand, the noblest 
efforts of heroism and self-sacrifice have been those 
inspired by Religion ; the purest characters on the 
page of History have been religious saints and 
martyrs ; the noblest monuments of art have been 
those created under the inspiration of Religion. 
How can we account for these strange contradic- 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 65 

tions, except upon the theory that it is because the 
religious sentiment is the deepest and most power- 
ful element in human nature ; that it produces when 
pure the noblest, when corrupt and perverted the 
most frightful, results, — results in either case tes- 
tifying to its tremendous power ? 

As a factor in History, then, Religion can least 
of all be overlooked ; and a question respecting it 
meets us at the very threshold. Are all the re- 
ligions of the world merely links in the chain of one 
continuous development of the religious element in 
human nature, or has any one religion a claim to 
the character of being a special and peculiar, that is 
to say, miraculously inspired revelation, — Mahom- 
etanism, for instance, as is claimed by the followers 
of Mahomet, or Christianity, as is at present claimed 
by a majority of Christians? In all that I shall 
say on the subject, I shall assume that there is no 
real foundation for such a claim on the part of any 
religion, but that all, the highest as well as the 
lowest, are equally the natural stages in one process 
of development ; and that the claim to an excep- 
tional and miraculous character is just one of 
those transient errors in the creed of Christendom 
which is to pass away under the influence of juster 
views of those laws of nature that modern Science 

5 



66 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

has introduced ; but whose passing away will not 
in the least degree affect the great truths which 
form the real substance of Christianity. 

We are living in a time of transition in regard to 
religious history; and the first and most momentous 
question which, as students of History, and stu- 
dents of modern Physical Science, you have to 
encounter, is the question of the true relation of 
Science to Religion. I shall speak more fully of 
this when we come to the period of the advent 
of Christianity. Meantime let me say here, that 
it is only in the minds of very superficial thinkers 
that Religion itself is discredited, because, for the 
time being, the progress of Science has outstripped 
the progress^ of organized Religion, and left the 
churches in the background, repeating creeds that 
contain much discredited mythology. As well 
might you say that the errors of alchemy discredit 
chemistry, or the errors of astrology discredit as- 
tronomy. Creeds and churches are but the tran- 
sient and perishable embodiments of the imperish- 
able religious sentiment. My own faith is, that it 
is the true mission of modern Science, not to over- 
throw, but to purify them. , I cannot myself con- 
ceive of such a thing as atheistic Science, though 
the shallower kind of scientific men are just now 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 67 

rather loud in proclaiming atheistic creeds. I 
think the very hope of Religion to-day lies in the 
progress of true Physical Science. It will sooner 
or later lay the belated ghost of Romanism, and 
put an end to the contentions of Protestant secta- 
rians that have heretofore brought such discredit 
on the name of Christianity, by showing how un- 
meaning are the questions on which they divide. 1 
Whatever of truth goes by that name, be sure can 
never suffer, but will .only gain new strength and 
power by the discovery of new truth on other lines 
of human thought. 2 

Meantime let us never forget that Religion is not 
a creed, but a life. Real religion consists in trying 
to live up to the highest that you believe, whatever 
may be the form of your belief; and when you look 
at it so, you find that good people do not differ so 
much as they seem to differ when you look only at 
the form, because the rules of right living are very 

1 In Whitaker's Almanac may be found a list, taken from 
the records of the Registrar General, of one hundred and eighty- 
seven sects in Great Britain, all but two or three Christian, and 
including eighteen varieties of Methodists and thirteen varieties of 
Baptists. 

2 See the whole subject admirably treated in Beard's "The 
Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in its Relation to Modern 
Thought and Knowledge," being the Hibbert Lectures for 1883. 
London, Williams & Norgate. 



68 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

simple things ; the difficulty is not so much -to 
know them as to obey them. To be pure, to be 
true, to be honest, to be just, to be generous, to 
prefer the higher things of life to the lower things, 
to feel always under a sense of responsibility to 
make the most and the best of ourselves, not 
merely for our own sake but for the sake of others, 
— it is such ideas as these that underlie all forms of 
Religion, and constitute the truth that is in them; 
and such ideas as these are consistent with all sorts 
of beliefs about other things. So long as you be- 
lieve them and try to act up to them, I will not say 
that it is of no importance, but I will say that it is of 
less importance, whether you believe that they are 
laws that were miraculously handed out of the 
clouds written on slabs of stone, or taught by a 
preacher who turned water into wine ; or whether 
you believe that men have arrived at them by 
processes as natural as those by which they have 
arrived at the doctrine of gravitation, or the princi- 
ples of the differential calculus. What the precise 
form shall be, in which we believe the essentials of 
Religion, is of far less consequence than that we 
believe them in some form. The poor Irish woman 
devoutly telling her beads before a wax image of the 
Virgin, is to me infinitely nearer the truth than the 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 69 

so-called man of enlightenment who sneers at her 
because he does not believe in Religion at all. I 
would rather be a believing Hindoo than a scepti- 
cal Christian, who simply says, "We don't know 
anything; let us drink and be merry, for to-morrow 
we die." 

Of course I do not say that it is of no conse- 
quence, or of little consequence, what form our 
religious convictions take. Intellectual mistakes 
in regard to Religion lead to the frightfulest of 
all perversions of human conduct. When our Puri- 
tan fathers hung witches and persecuted Quakers, 
they verily thought they were doing God service. 
They were only following out, to their logical con- 
sequences, the doctrines of a mistaken creed. It 
makes the blood run cold to read in the pages of the 
historian, the description of those great public festi- 
vals presided over by dignitaries of the Christian 
church, and attended by all the inhabitants of Chris- 
tian cities, where unhappy men and women, perhaps 
the purest and noblest of the day, were tied to the 
stake and slowly burned to death, for not believing 
exactly like their tormentors. Yet this was called 
an Act of Faith, and unhappily it was one. But it 
argues nothing against Religion, that such things 
have been done in the name of Religion ; it rather 



7<D HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

shows the depth of the sentiment that can be so 
wretchedly perverted. Here in Boston, in the nine- 
teenth century, people boasting themselves to be 
Christians were wont to defend negro slavery out 
of the Bible ; but that only showed that they took 
an entirely false view of what the Bible really is. It 
is therefore of the greatest consequence that we 
should do our best to get true views on religious, 
as on all other subjects, because false ones lead so 
easily to frightful mistakes in conduct ; and there 
is only one way to this, and that is to prize truth 
above all things, and to be courageously and con- 
scientiously independent in the pursuit of it, here 
as everywhere. To be sure, any fool can be inde- 
pendent, and some of the greatest fools talk loudest 
of their independence; but to be conscientiously 
independent, and to have the courage of one's 
convictions, that is not easy. It is that sort of 
independence that I shall try to inculcate here by 
precept and example. You shall on all occasions 
know exactly what I believe ; and it shall not be 
the fault of my teaching if you do not learn on 
this, as on all other subjects, not only to think in- 
dependently, but to think earnestly and seriously 
for yourselves. 

In the light of the modern comparative method, 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 71 

the distinction between religious and secular in 
History is rapidly disappearing ; and the year one 
of our era no longer marks a great cataclysm in 
History like those that were once supposed to di- 
vide geological eras. The evolution of Religion is 
seen to be as much a natural process as the evolu- 
tion of Science, or of Literature, or of Art. But 
to my mind the distinction between religious and 
secular disappears, because the further we proceed 
in scientific knowledge the more plainly it appears 
that not some things but all things are divine, and 
the work of infinite power. It is not a part of 
History, but all History, that in the highest and 
truest sense becomes miraculous, because true Sci- 
ence does not destroy, it only deepens our wonder. 
For all things end in mystery. What is more 
mysterious than the blossoming of a flower or the 
growth of a seed ? With all your science you can- 
not explain it. The growth of a religion is no more 
unintelligible than the growth of an empire, and no 
less so; and neither is so mysterious as the growth 
of an oak out of a little acorn. The uncultivated 
and the ignorant cannot see the wonder and mystery 
of common things ; they must be struck with some- 
thing strange and surprising ; just as they do not 
care to go to the Art Museum to see beautiful pic- 



72 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

tures or statues, but frequent some vulgar show, to 
see monsters and giants. The rude man sees only 
that some things are wonderful ; the unbeliever 
thinks that nothing is wonderful ; but the wise 
man sees that all things are, because all things 
are divine. 

I apprehend that as the relation of the finite to 
the infinite is the deepest and most perplexing of 
problems, the story of the development of men's 
ideas respecting it, and the influence those varying 
ideas have had upon their actions in the various 
stages of evolution through which civilization has 
passed, is the most momentous chapter in all His- 
tory ; the most momentous, and also the most 
difficult to read right, because the most obscured 
by passion, by fanaticism, by superstition. It may 
safely be said that a true history of Religion has 
never yet been written, and that the comparative 
method is only now beginning to .give the right 
clew. 

But the history of the rise and growth of Religion 
is only one chapter, though a very great and im- 
portant one, in the history of human progress. To 
be sure, it is interwoven with all the rest. I speak 
of chapters, and for convenience' sake we must di- 
vide up History into chapters, and deal with its 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 73 

great topics separately, but without forgetting for a 
moment that this division is only for convenience, 
and that, strictly speaking, no such separation is 
possible. History is such a vast and complicated 
network, that without some amount of arbitrary 
subdivision and classification it could not be handled 
at all ; but when we speak of religious history, poli- 
tical history, economic history, and the like, we 
must never forget that the separation we thus 
make in our minds and in our books has little to 
correspond to it in reality. The simplest event in 
History is really the result of the whole vast com- 
plex of historical forces acting together. The sub- 
ject of History is one living scene, the great field 
of human life, the counterpart of that world of in- 
teracting forces which it is the province of Physical 
Science to explore ; and division and classification 
are here, as there, mere necessary helps to our un- 
derstanding rather than broad lines of separation 
among the forces themselves. Political history, for 
instance, would go but little way in explaining its spe- 
cial phenomena if it took no account of the immense 
force which Religion has brought to bear upon 
Politics. We make a special subject of Commerce 
and Industry, and call the science that deals with 
it Political Economy ; but Political Economy by 



74 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

itself is a science of mere abstractions. You can- 
not take a step in working out the true story of the 
development of industry without taking account of 
other than industrial forces. That is bad political 
economy whose writers never look beyond the nar- 
row bounds of their own subject. 

I ventured the statement that a true history 
of Religion had yet to be written, a history that 
should be neither eastern Roman nor western Ro- 
man, neither Calvinist nor Lutheran, but human. 
Greater progress has been made with the chapter 
next in importance to the religious- chapter. If 
you open almost any standard history you will find 
its main subject to be politics, and the wars and 
battles and conquests and treaties by which gov- 
ernments are made and unmade, and kings are set 
up and pulled down, and political revolutions are 
effected. And there is good reason for this promi- 
nence, because man is before all things, as Aris- 
totle said long ago, a political animal, and gets his 
strength and his power to make progress altogether 
from social organization. History is properly the 
story of the evolution of the social organization ; 
and a true science of History is that which gives a 
right estimate of the mutual action of the various 
forces that have brought about that evolution. By 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 7$ 

Government we mean social organization ; by Law 
the rules whereby it is framed, and obedience to 
which is necessary to its existence. Laws are the 
embodiment, for the time being, of a people's high- 
est notions of social organization ; and improve- 
ment in Law and Government means progress to- 
wards a higher ideal of social life. It is for this 
reason that Mr. Froude has maintained, with some 
extravagance, that the best manual of History is 
the statute-book. And yet would not a perusal of 
the Constitution and Revised Statutes of Massa- 
chusetts carry one very far towards a right esti- 
mate of the civilization of Massachusetts ? For 
these are the regulations which the people of that 
Commonwealth have seen fit to make or to adopt 
for the ordering of their social life. And though 
the sphere of Law is outward action, and the deep- 
est part of life is the part not reached by statutes, 
yet as the outward life comes from, the inner, it 
may safely be said that the character of the laws 
we live under is a pretty good index of the degree 
of civilization we have reached. I have shown 
that the real student of History must grapple with 
the problems of Theology ; it is equally needful 
that he should grapple with the problems of the 
law. 



76 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

One would think, to judge from popular opinion, 
that the law was a sort of black art, whose myste- 
ries could only be understood by the initiated, that 
is to say, the lawyers ; and certainly this view may 
be just enough of the practice of the law. It is an 
old proverb, and true enough, that the layman who 
attempts to be his own lawyer has a fool for a 
client ; though just as a knowledge of the rules 
of health is useful in keeping us out of the hands 
of the physician, so some rudimentary knowledge of 
the law will be even of practical value in keeping us 
out of the courts, a consummation devoutly to be 
wished. Bat the knowledge of Law as an art is one 
thing; the knowledge of Law as a science, a branch 
of ethics, and an aid in the study of History, is 
quite another; and I am prepared to maintain that 
you can never become successful students of His- 
tory without this latter kind of legal knowledge. 
This is not, perhaps, to give so agreeable a view of 
the study of History as that which makes it consist 
of the gossip of courts, and the intrigues of politi- 
cians, and the stirring details of wars and battles, 
but I think it is a j uster view. No one will read 
History right who has not learned to look upon it 
as one of the most difficult of all sciences. You 
may easily get a cheap and empirical knowledge of 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 77 

Physical Science ; but really to get at its laws you 
must begin with your dry and abstract, and it may 
be distasteful, mathematics. If there is a science 
of society, — and I am making that assumption in 
all I am saying, — there must be abstract princi- 
ples to be mastered ; and some of these appear in 
the shape of legal principles, — the principles that lie 
at the foundation of jurisprudence, and are the basis 
of codes ; that is to say, those bodies of rules which 
at different periods and in different nations and 
countries have grown out of the social customs of 
those periods and nations. Indeed, I am sorry to 
say that I must go still further ; for as Government 
and Law are not mere physical facts, and as Law has 
ultimately to do with the minds and motives of men, 
— with their ways of acting as they spring out of their 
ways of thinking, — we come at last, in the study of 
Law and Government, as we came before in the study 
of religions and creeds and churches, to the study of 
the laws of mind ; just as we have to base our con- 
crete study of physics on the study of the abstract 
laws of quantity and number. It is not, perhaps, a 
pleasant prospect that the study of History thus 
necessarily involves us in the mazes of metaphysics ; 
but I can see no help for it, unless we choose to 
keep on the surface, and for History substitute the 



78 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

gossip of History, and adopt the cheap and easy 
method, somewhat popular nowadays, of denying 
that there is any such thing as Philosophy. My 
own belief is that in the long run the best philoso- 
pher will be the best student of History, and the 
best system of Philosophy the best key to its rid- 
dles. The denial that there is any such thing as 
Philosophy is itself a philosophy, and a very bad 
one. I am aware that in all this I am engaging 
you in very grave considerations, but it is unavoid- 
able if I am to teach you not History but how to 
study History. 

But I do not mean that you should begin your 
study of History with the attempt to master some 
cut-and-dried Philosophy of History, whether that 
of Comte or that of Hegel. I only mean that you 
should pursue the study in the same spirit as that 
in which you study Physical Science, seeking every- 
where for laws, though not the same laws. Facts 
are only the raw material of History ; in studying 
them you are as truly working in a laboratory as 
when you are manipulating your chemical or your 
physical apparatus downstairs. Here, as there, 
your aim should be, out of the comparison of facts 
to deduce laws ; not here the laws that govern the 
life of matter, but the laws that govern the life 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 79 

of man, — the laws of mind. Just as the material 
world is the sensible embodiment of physical law, 
so the social world is only the outcome and embodi- 
ment of mental law. Society and Government are 
what they are, because man is what he is ; and to 
know them you must begin and end with know- 
ing mind. History is applied psychology. His- 
torical events are the thoughts and feelings of men 
writ large ; and you do not really understand the 
doings of great men or even of great nations until 
you find some thought or feeling in yourself that 
interprets those by which they were moved. 

I can recommend to you no good elementary 
book in English either on Political Science or on 
Law. It has not been heretofore the habit of Eng- 
lishmen, governed as they are by their uncodified 
traditional common law, to look upon Law as a sci- 
ence. Their point of view has been a purely prac- 
tical one, although it was the object of Blackstone's 
famous Commentaries to popularize a knowledge of 
it. Elementary books on English constitutional his- 
tory are plentiful and good, and I suppose I can 
assume that through some one of the many school 
text-books you have all acquired a general knowledge 
of the framework of our own government. But a 
good elementary book on Law and Government is 



8o HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

still to seek ; and I fear that the science of education 
must make a great advance upon its present rude 
condition before a competent thinker can find it 
worth his while to write such a book. 1 

The combined results of the new sciences of 
Comparative Philology and Prehistoric Archae- 
ology, have effected nothing less than a complete 
revolution in all our ideas respecting the origin of 

1 In the absence of such a book, the teacher of History must 
embody in his oral instruction the fruit of his own studies. This 
is not the place to lay out a course of reading, if I were compe- 
tent to do it. I need hardly mention the writings of Sir Henry 
Maine, whose influence is giving such a new aspect to English 
legal and political investigation. For a rather astonishing ac- 
count of the state of legal education in England, see Professor 
Dicey's recent inaugural discourse, as Professor of Law, at Ox- 
ford : " One shelf of the library at the Temple," he says, " would 
be amply sufficient to contain every volume which does credit to 
our legal literature. We have no History of English Law as a 
whole, deserving of the name ; we have not twenty treatises worthy 
to stand side by side with the productions of great jurists in other 
countries." He pays a high compliment to American legal writers 
and the teaching of American law-schools. That a change is com- 
ing over the spirit of legal study in England is apparent from the 
publication of such books as Mr. Lightwood's " Nature of Posi- 
tive Law " and Professor Pollock's "Essays." The student will 
find Professor Holland's " Elements of Jurisprudence " a very 
helpful book. 2d ed. Clarendon Press, 1882. 

Why should not some general knowledge of legal theory be 
considered an essential part of all forms of liberal education, 
whether literary or scientific, as it certainly is a necessary ingre- 
dient in all true methods of historical study ? 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. Si 

human society. So long as Hebrew mythology 
was accepted as authentic history, and the creation 
of man was supposed to have taken place only 
some poor six thousand years ago, there could be 
no such thing as true historical perspective. Now 
the discoveries of lost traces of mankind in bone- 
caves and kitchen-middens, combined with the 
unerring testimony of the rocks, has thrown the 
origin of man an indefinite number of thousands 
of years into the past ; and his existence on earth 
begins to be counted, not by centuries, but by geo- 
logic cycles. Now, too, Comparative Philology, 
working on the seemingly dead material of words, 
has brought to light a whole prehistoric world of 
human life, wherein were laid, through generations 
which we have no means of counting, and ages be- 
fore any historic record came into being, all the 
foundations of modern social life. No one can any 
longer pretend to be a student of History who 
does not begin his historical studies with master- 
ing this, the latest written chapter of modern his- 
torical science. It is no extravagance to say that 
he will not understand even his newspaper till he 
knows who the Aryans were, nor the Aryans un- 
less he knows who came before them. The history 
of the United States is not more the history of the 

6 



82 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

migrations of races than is the history of Europe, 
that is to say, the history of civilization. 1 

I began with Religion as a factor in History be- 
cause it is concerned with the deepest springs of 
human action. I passed to Law and Government, 
because under those terms are embraced all that 
concerns the framework of human society. Under 
what other heads will it be convenient to arrange 
the vast and confused and complicated phenomena 
of human life which are the material of History? 
The religious and political chapters, important as 
they are, clearly do not exhaust the subject. An- 
other feature in the situation soon strikes us as of 
prime importance, namely, that man, to realize his 
humanity, has to labor with head and hands. I say 
" to realize his humanity," for it is beginning to 
be pretty evident that man began his career as a 
brute among brutes, with only the potentiality of 
becoming human ; and that he has only gradually 
raised himself from the brute condition by the in- 
telligent application of labor to the realization of 

1 See, among innumerable other books, learned and popular, 
Geikie's " Prehistoric Europe," Dawkins's " Early Man in Britain,'' 
Lubbock's " Prehistoric Times," Tylor's " Early History of Man- 
kind," Hearn's "Aryan Household," Pictet's "Origines Indo- 
Europeennes," Farrar's " Language and Languages/' and Keary's 
popular little " Dawn of History." 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 83 

something higher than a mere animal existence. 
It is the possession of a capacity for such progress 
that differentiates him from all other living crea- 
tures ; and certainly that can be no unimportant 
chapter in his history which undertakes to describe 
the different stages of this industrial development. 
The science which deals with human labor, as ap- 
plied to the production, accumulation, and distribu- 
tion of wealth, has received the rather objectionable 
name of Political Economy ; and the story of the 
gradual steps by which man has found out arts and 
inventions to draw forth the resources of nature, 
the command of which places him above the brutes 
and gives him their control, would be the economic 
chapter of History. It is plain that this must 
remain a subordinate chapter so long as the brute 
element in him remains uppermost, and that is 
very long. Who shall say that that period is 
ended so long as men still apply all the resources 
of their newly found sciences so much to the art 
of mutual destruction ? It is this meeting of ex- 
tremes, this combination of intellect with brutality, 
the latest with the earliest phase of human devel- 
opment, that makes war so increasingly disgusting. 
To see herds of buffaloes fighting, creates no feel- 
ing of repugnance, for we know it is as much in 



84 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

the order of nature as a thunder-storm. But to 
see herds of intelligent men, armed with all the de- 
structive appliances their very intelligence has in- 
vented, destroying each other like buffaloes, gives a 
sense of horrible incongruity which grows stronger 
and stronger as civilization advances, and the con- 
tinued existence of such a practice serves to show 
how little way, with all our boasting, mankind have 
yet emerged from savagery. And this is doubtless 
the true view of the situation. When we consider 
the little way — a paltry few thousands of years — 
which recorded History carries us back, as com- 
pared with the uncounted ages during which, as we 
now know, mankind have been denizens of this 
planet, we are forced to consider all we count civi- 
lization as but a little fringe of light on a vast 
abyss of darkness, and viewing it thus we learn to 
be less impatient of the slowness of our progress. 
Spite of the mere material advance the world has 
made, we are to all appearance living in the very 
infancy of civilization ; and the thought may well 
give us courage to endure all its hideous contradic- 
tions. No savagery of bone-caves is worse than 
the civilized savagery of East London or the slums 
of New York. 

But though material progress does not constitute 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 85 

civilization, and though History furnishes many a 
proof that outward luxury and splendor may vanish 
like a dream, — for where now are Babylon and 
Carthage and Egyptian magnificence and Roman 
greatness ? — yet progress in material well-being is 
the necessary foundation for all other progress; and 
any study of History will be lamentably incomplete 
which passes over its economic chapter. But that 
chapter is the latest written, because it is not till 
great advance has been made in the evolution of a 
true philosophy of life that the true place of labor 
can be recognized. The whole of recorded History 
thus far is occupied with periods when the barbaric 
spirit prevailed, and labor was looked upon as de- 
grading. Indeed, though with the advent of demo- 
cratic institutions, the government of society may 
be said to have passed into the hands of Labor, it 
is neither yet prepared for, nor has it yet entered 
into, its inheritance ; nor can it till it shall be quali- 
fied, by the slow process of education, to exercise 
its power rightly. Till then, if no longer a slave 
or a serf, the laboring man will be an inferior, as in 
that past when the brute element was uppermost, 
and destruction, not construction, was the only road 
to honor. We are still indeed so much under the 
control of ideas derived from that past, and of laws 



86 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

and institutions framed in accordance with them, 
that even in this most democratic of all countries, 
it is a little difficult to conceive of the state of 
things which the full development of democratic 
institutions will bring with it. It is easy to see 
that kings by divine right, and hereditary peers, 
-and landed aristocracies, standing armies and Pa- 
pacies and State Churches, and the like old-world 
institutions are all relics of the past; that we in 
America have stepped out of all that, into a new 
social atmosphere ; and with the disappearance of 
that great blot and incongruity, negro slavery, have 
at last entered upon our real task, the building up 
of a state based upon the doctrine, as upon a 
corner-stone, of the rights and dignity of Labor. 
The democratic doctrine of the rule of the ma- 
jority can be nothing but that ; and I for one have 
faith that through whatever further toil and suffer- 
ing and disaster it may be appointed us to pass, 
the task will end in the creation of a civiliza- 
tion better than the world has yet seen. It is 
more honorable to labor than to kill ; moreXhris- 
tian, that is to say more human, to recognize your 
neighbor's rights than to trample on them. That 
is still a brutal world in which only the strongest, 
or the richest, or the most cunning, bear rule. Po- 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. %7 

litical wisdom may be only the wisdom of a Machia- 
velli. It takes some courage, even in these days 
of nominal Christianity, to say that the evolution of 
a higher form of society requires a moral wisdom 
which can only be looked for with any hope in the 
direction of the cultivated and developed senti- 
ment of the working classes. And yet this is real 
republicanism, and nothing else is republican. 

But, you say, look at the crude socialisms that 
prevail among the working classes ; do you call 
these true economic or true Christian philosophy ? 
No ; I call them the precursors of such a philos- 
ophy ; the gropings of men long kept in the dark 
when they begin to emerge into the light of day. 
If you will impartially survey the whole field of 
economic discussion you will find no reason to be 
discouraged. For, in the first place, the labors of 
many acute and powerful minds, since the days of 
Adam Smith, have worked out certain first princi- 
ples of economic science, however few in number, 
which will stand as fundamental doctrines regard- 
ing the production and distribution of wealth, to 
be taken up into that new science of society which, 
however little we may like the new name for it, or 
however little faith we may have in the pretentious 
structures that are erected in its name, is cer- 



88 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. ' 

tainly destined to be the fruit of the doctrine of 
evolution as applied to the phenomena of History. 
I am not at all disturbed by the fact that ignorance 
should misapprehend it, or that sciolists should 
frame crude schemes whose falsity is proved by 
their very completeness. It will be many a long 
year yet before a true sociology shall be practically 
worked out, as the scheme of life of a truly demo- 
cratic society ; and all the later in this country be- 
cause so much of the wreck and rubbish of old- 
world society is flung upon our shores, and has to 
be deodorized and assimilated. But a germ has 
been planted here which will survive ; and our soci- 
ety, when it emerges full-grown from all thejDerils 
that surround its childhood, will be an educated 
industrial, not a military, not a feudal, not an aris- 
tocratic, society, least of all that basest of aristoc- 
racies, an aristocracy of wealth. The brutal and 
ignorant millionaires of the day are very temporary 
and very contemptible phenomena : even now it is 
hardly too much to say that the vulgar misuse of 
wealth is the exception, the noble and generous 
use of it the rule ; and temporary phenomena, too, 
let us hope, are those disgusting demagogues who 
crawl into power by imposing on the ignorance 
of the half-educated workingman, and figuring as 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 89 

his special champions. It requires a somewhat ro- 
bust faith, I admit, to survey our politics and still 
believe in our institutions ; but I have faith in the 
unbrokeii moral strength of a nation that by one de- 
termined effort abolished slavery, and then quietly 
betook itself to paying off the mountain of debt it 
had incurred. Now to abolish slavery was not only 
to abolish the last relic of feudalism in the destruc- 
tion of the most tyrannous of aristocracies ; not only 
to right a great social wrong by setting free the 
oppressed and down-trodden : it was the greatest of 
all steps in the elevation of Labor, and the removal 
of the last obstacle in the way of the establishment 
of the principle of the rule of the majority, on 
which, whether we believe in it or whether we fear 
it, our republican experiment is founded. 

I think, too, that much is to be hoped from the 
moral sense of a nation that insists upon paying its 
way and being before all things solvent. This may 
sound very utilitarian, and there is much nonsense, 
it seems to me, expended upon that word. But 
really it is the first duty both of men and nations to 
earn their living and to be solvent. So completely 
do notions derived from the past pervade our phi- 
losophy, that they corrupt our very education by 
giving rise to that false antithesis between "liberal" 



90 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

and "utilitarian," about which we hear so much. 
A gentlemanly knowledge, which can hardly be dis- 
tinguished from a gentlemanly ignorance, of things 
in general, coupled with a gentlemanly incapacity 
for any kind of useful work, is apt to be the upshot 
of what passes for a "liberal" education at a fash- 
ionable college. It is an ideal of what is called the 
higher education, which we have borrowed from the 
aristocratic system of our mother country, whose 
two great universities, the wealthiest and hereto- 
fore, in comparison with their resources, the most 
inefficient institutions of learning in the world, 
have for ages been an integral part of the class 
system which it is the mission of republicanism to 
overthrow. It was that artificial system of society 
which, coming down from the times of ignorance 
when useful labor was reckoned plebeian, has 
bequeathed to us this false antithesis between 
"liberal" and "utilitarian" which plays such a part 
among the empty commonplaces of educational dis- 
cussion. Let me propose to you a new definition 
of the term "liberal education," — that it is the 
education which, by developing most harmoniously 
and perfectly those peculiar aptitudes a man has 
received from nature, prepares him to make the 
best possible use of life, and therefore to be in the 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 91 

highest degree serviceable to the community. The 
" utilitarian " element which the aristocratic educa- 
tion theory rejects, I would make the corner-stone 
of the educational structure; for I conceive that no 
education can deserve the term " liberal " that does 
not prepare a man for a life of independent useful- 
ness to his fellow-men. 

To say that this age is pre-eminently a utilitarian 
age, and that the task set before this country is pre- 
eminently a utilitarian task, I cannot consider as 
any reproach. Every period in History has been 
characterized by some peculiar set of the intellect- 
ual current ; and the intellectual movement of that 
in which we live is strongly, as all must feel, in the 
direction of Physical Science. In no age of the 
world has such great and rapid progress been made 
in physical discovery. To suppose that all this 
new knowledge will not be turned to practical use 
is to expect an absurdity; to wish it would be the 
height of folly. For the practical outcome of all 
these scientific discoveries is a progress in the 
amelioration of man's outward condition such as 
the world has never seen before. A laborer is 
housed and fed and clothed nowadays better than 
the kings of old. And with the physical there will 
come a corresponding intellectual and moral prog- 



92 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

ress, but the physical must come first. We are liv- 
ing in an age of vast material enterprises ; and we 
in this country are busy before all things with de- 
veloping the material resources of a new world. 
We are living therefore in what must be pre-emi- 
nently an economic age, an age of capitalists, of 
machines and industrial inventions, of the increas- 
ing power of the wage-earners, of labor organiza- 
tion, and of industrial instead of political contests. 
It is to look at the subject from an entirely wrong 
point of view, to suppose that the result of this has 
not been on the whole beneficent. Strife, no doubt, 
still often arises between Labor and Capital ; but 
if there is one principle that has successfully as- 
serted itself, it is the principle of the dignity of 
Labor. The monopoly of power and wealth by 
privileged classes of hereditary idlers is gone ; and 
nothing characterizes the present time so distinctly 
as the steady rise in intelligence of the workingmen, 
and the steady increase of their share in the control 
of affairs and in the profits of industry. 1 

There is no more hopeful page in the history of 

1 It is a grave economic mistake to suppose that the profits of 
our enormously expanding modern industries inure chiefly to the 
benefit of the capitalist. That eminent statistician, Mr. Robert 
Giffen, has recently shown that the increase of the working-class 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 93 

modern civilization than the history of the steady 
progress, in intelligence and self-control of the 
English working-classes through the instrumental- 
ity of trades-unionism, and the disappearance from 
the English statute-book of all the tyrannical and 
oppressive enactments in restraint of workmen's 
freedom. 1 Even the wildest of continental social- 
isms are only encouraging signs that the toilers 
who still surfer under Russian despotism and Prus- 
sian militarism are alive to their sufferings, and 
struggling, though still blindly, for relief. Politics 
have yielded to the current, and the greatest na- 
tional movements nowadays are colonizing and com- 
mercial. It is absurd to regret this state of things. 
We have no choice but to adapt ourselves to it ; 
and it is needless to point out that if we would 
do that, we must before all things study the eco- 
nomic side 'of History, of the History of the past, 
and still more of the History of the times in which 
we live. This predominant importance of eco- 
nomic questions is an outgrowth of such recent date 
that the establishment of Economic Science as a 

income is greater than that of any other class, being 160 per cent ; 
while the return of capital is only 100 per cent. See " Journal of 
the Statistical Society," for December, 1883. 

1 See, whoever doubts it, Thornton on " Labor," and Ludlow 
& Jones's " Progress of the English Working-Classes." 



94 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

separate branch of study dates back only a century, 
and is inseparably connected in England with the 
great name of Adam Smith. 1 

Let so much be said for the economic side of 
History ; but we must not stop there. I said that 
the antithesis between " liberal " and " utilitarian " 
was a false antithesis. It springs out of a deeper 
falsity, that, namely, which is made by shallow sys- 
tems of philosophy between the material and the 
spiritual. The materialistic philosophy that ignores 
mind, or attempts to resolve it into mere processes 
of matter, is to the full as absurd as the spurious 
spiritualism that endeavors to ignore matter in the 
interests of mind, — that old-time asceticism, not yet 
quite dead, which taught that the only way to save 
the soul was to starve and despise the body ; which 
set St. Simeon on his pillar, and produced all the 
abominations of monasticism. In truth, it is as 
easy for us to imagine an outside without an inside, 
or a top without a bottom, as to attempt in this life 
to imagine mind without matter or matter without 

1 With all respect for the orthodox economists, I cannot help 
thinking that the future of the study lies in the hands of the histori- 
cal school of economic inquirers. See the paper " On the Philo- 
sophical Method of Political Economy " in the essays of the late 
Professor T. E. C. Leslie, and the remarkable address of Professor 
Ingram in the Proceedings of the British Association for 1878. 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. - 95 

mind. To know them at all we must know them 
together, — the one the manifestation of the other. 
But there is a deep underlying conviction, which no 
materialism will ever shake, that the only perma- 
nent realities are the realities of thought, and that 
the real world is the world of ideas. That material 
progress that ends in a more splendid or more lux- 
urious life of the senses is only the setting of pigs 
to wallow in a superior kind of sty, as is shown 
by many an example of the brutal and vulgar use 
of suddenly acquired wealth all round us. To look 
upon this as the only legitimate outcome of eco- 
nomic progress is the shallow view of pulpit tradi- 
tion. The true outcome of economic as of all other 
progress is enlargement of the domain of thought, 
first through the hard mental toil and the absolute 
allegiance to truth which that progress directly re- 
quires, 1 and next through its results, in emancipat- 

1 I do not think that this influence is sufficiently appreciated. 
The man of science at the present day is the representative of 
absolute loyalty to Truth : he must follow wherever she leads. He 
can subscribe to no scientific creeds which he only half believes ; 
can have no thirty-nine or any other number of scientific articles 
which he does not dare to question ; stands in no need of patching 
up compromises between old books of origins and new scientific 
revelations. This is the reason why all the vigorous intellects of 
the day arcenlisted in the cause of Science ; while Theology, still 
hampered by the dead lumber of tradition, enlists only half-hearted 



96 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. ' 

ing men more and more from bondage to physical 
labor. Wealth brings with it leisure, not merely to 
make more wealth, but also leisure to be men. To 
lead the life of the senses is to remain a brute even 
though it be in a thrice-gilded sty; to be a man is 
to lead the life of thought. The true progress of 
the world is only in the realization of more and 
more thought, the adding more and more to the 
world's intellectual and moral life. Now as His- 
tory is the record of external action, what we call 
Literature is properly the history and record of the 
world's progress in thought ; and therefore it is plain 
to see that for the historical student to neglect that 
would be to take the shell and leave the kernel. 
For all action comes out of thought, and the solid- 
est seeming fact is only the outward embodiment 
of it. History is properly the search for the ideas 
represented by these facts, whether the fact be an 
institution or a battle or a cathedral. It is not the 
details of slaughter we care for, but the question, 
what caused the battle ? nor the outward form of 



advocates and supporters who can feel far better than they can 
reason. The intellecttial level of the pulpit is to-day sadly below 
that of the scientific lecture-room, and it will continue to be so until 
the one is as free as the other. There can be no intellectual vigor 
where there is no intellectual freedom. 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 97 

the institution except so far as it reveals the ideas it 
embodies : it is the " sad sincerity " we seek, of 

" The hand that rounded Peter's dome, 
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome." 

Literature therefore gives us the inside of History, 
because it is the record, so far as it gets recorded, 
of the thought of the ages. To know Greece we 
must read not merely of Marathon and Plataea, of 
Aristides and Cimon and Themistocles ; we must 
read in Aristotle and Plato and Homer and Aes- 
chylus, or we shall get but an outside view of 
Greece. For the wars and battles, the governments 
and institutions, are not intelligible till we get down 
to the thought that is realized in them ; and to know 
tKe men is not so much to know their faces and 
actions as it is to know the spirit and the ideas that 
were incarnated in them. 

The separation, therefore, in our books of what we 
call Literature from what we call History is a mere 
matter of arrangement and outward convenience ; 
the putting them too widely apart in our thoughts 
and our studies will be sure to make both unfruitful. 
A poem is often the most precious of historical 
documents ; and a philosopher will often go much 
deeper into History than an annalist. What nar- 
rative of events takes us half so far into mediaeval- 

7 



98 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

ism as the great poem of Dante ? Even the silliest 
aesthetic verse-maker who ever sang of sunflowers 
may have an infinitesimal historical value as illus- 
trating the folly of the age. 

The word Literature is, to be sure, a very vague 
one. Sometimes we mean by it the whole of writ- 
ten or printed matter ; sometimes we use it in a 
narrower sense, in which it corresponds to the 
phrase belles-lettres. But, excluding Physical, 
Political, and Economic Science, and, for our present 
purpose, all narrative History, we shall find that 
what remains is chiefly Philosophy and Poetry. 
Must a man, then, to be a student of History, grap- 
ple with the abstruse problems of Metaphysics ? 
Yes, not only to be a student of History, but to be a 
student of anything. For Philosophy is really only 
the formulating of the first principles of knowl- 
edge. If you are not a good philosopher, be sure 
you will be a bad one ; for to think at all is to phi- 
losophize. And if you do not take some pains to 
examine the various theories as to the nature of 
human knowledge which the great thinkers have 
propounded who have successively represented the 
spirit of past ages, you will unavoidably, though 
perhaps unconsciously, adopt without examination 
the theory that happens to be uppermost at the 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 99 

moment, whether it be some narrow orthodoxy 
on the one hand, or, on the other, some positivism 
or pessimism or agnosticism, which is more likely 
to be a passing mental epidemic than a mark of 
mental progress, or a healthy growth of thought, — 
the philosophy, for instance, which teaches that Phi- 
losophy is itself a disease, and that all real knowl- 
edge comes out of retorts and microscopes and 
crucibles. But if, as I have maintained, our true life 
is the life of thought, not the life of the senses, and 
if the life of the senses itself is unintelligible till 
interpreted by thought, then, unless this world is a 
chaos, there must be traceable through the ages 
some orderly development of reasoned thought that 
constitutes their inner, just as the chronicle of 
events constitutes their outer, History. Such an 
orderly development of reasoned thought, attempt- 
ing to give a rational meaning to all that is and all 
that happens, is what we mean by Philosophy. And 
that is only to say, in other words, that by Philos- 
ophy we mean the essence of all knowledge ; that 
even chemists and physicists themselves, to be 
more than mere observers and cataloguers of sights 
and sounds and outward impressions, must be 
above all things philosophers. And you will find 
it very true that the study of Physics soon leads 



100. HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

you into the study of Metaphysics ; for you cannot 
think an outside without an inside. 

Philosophy, then, instead of being a vain beating 
of the air, as many would have us believe it, is 
simply the attempt to formulate the first principles 
of knowledge ; and it is idle to say that here man 
makes and can make no progress, for that would be 
to surrender all belief In reason. To deny the pos- 
sibility of Philosophy is, as I said, itself a philoso- 
phy, and a very bad one. Either we live in and 
form a part of a painted show of mere illusory 
phenomena, — in which case all thought is useless, 
— or else along with the steady outward progress 
the world makes there must be an inner progress 
in thought to correspond to it. The thoughts of 
Plato and Aristotle, of Descartes and Leibnitz, 
of Kant and Hegel, are at least as much a part 
of real knowledge as the thoughts of Faraday or 
Owen or Darwin or Huxley. 

Now, as the student of History is the student of 
men's actions as governed by motives and con- 
trolled by mind, he can least of all spare himself 
the study of Philosophy; for it is only through Phi- 
losophy that he can reach a rational explanation of 
the principles of mental action. The historical 
student must perforce be a practical metaphysician. 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 101 

Not only do Law, Politics, Political Economy — all 
the studies that are fundamental to the study of 
History — lead straight up to abstract principles 
which can only be formulated by the help of a wider 
Philosophy that shall include them all, but the 
historical student cannot measure the influence on 
events of any single great man, — a problem con- 
stantly occurring, — without taking the measure of 
his mind, and, from the evidence of his deeds and 
of his thoughts, making out the scheme of his 
character. The calculus of History, as being con- 
cerned with living factors, is far more difficult than 
the calculus of the Mathematics. 

Nevertheless it must be admitted that the ab- 
stract study of Metaphysics can easily be made as 
unprofitable a waste of time as can the abstract 
study of Mathematics. 1 Great philosophers are 
surely worth studying, but they are as rare as great 

1 Of the feats performed by candidates in the competitive math- 
ematical examinations at English Cambridge, the late Mr. Tod- 
hunter, the famous mathematical tutor, says : " I am not likely 
to undervalue the special ability which is thus cherished, but 
I cannot feel that I esteem it so highly as the practice of the 
University really suggests. It seems to me, at least partially, to 
resemble the chess-playing power which we find marvellously de- 
veloped in some persons : the feats which we see or know to be 
performed by adepts at this game are very striking, but the utility 
of them may be doubted whether we regard the chess-player as an 
end to himself or to his country." — Conflict of Studies, p. 196. 



102 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

poets ; and no man can call himself educated who 
has not gone so far in the study of them as at least 
to imbibe some portion of their spirit ; but for most 
of us that definition of Philosophy is best which 
makes it a habit of mind we acquire from the right 
conduct of all our studies rather than from tracking 
the devious mazes of endless abstract systems. 

But, finally, what can Poetry have to do with His- 
tory, — the idle art of putting thoughts into words 
that jingle instead of using words that do not ? 
Certainly very little, if that is the true definition of 
Poetry, if Poetry differs from Prose in form only, 
and not in substance. But that is not the true 
definition of Poetry ; and before answering the ques- 
tion, what Poetry has to do with History, we must 
ascertain what Poetry really is. Now Poetry, by 
virtue of its being expressed in words, is to be reck- 
oned a branch of literature ; but it gives a truer view 
of it to say that by virtue of its being one high 
mode of expression of our sense of beauty, it is 
more truly to be called a branch of art. The 
question becomes, therefore, another ; namely, what 
is Art ? and this question brings us to quite a new 
way of looking at the world. You may study the 
outer world of matter in order to understand it, and 
then you have Physical Science ; you may study the 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 103 

inner world of mind in order to understand it, and 
then you have Mental Science. But you may con- 
template the world, whether of matter or of man, 
not to understand but to enjoy it, and then you have 
Art. The element which gives enjoyment we call 
beauty ; and the feeling for beauty which is innate 
in us gives rise to the efforts not only to enjoy but 
to reproduce it in various forms, and stamped with 
a human impress; these constitute the Fine Arts, 
one of which, and not the least, is Poetry. True 
Poetry, therefore, is only the thoughts and feelings 
of rational beings clothed in a form of beauty ; and 
that part of Poetry which is not concerned with the 
beauty of the material universe must needs be con- 
cerned with beauty in human character and human 
life. I need not say, then, that Poetry has the 
closest connection with all that is best in History, 
because it is the interpreter of all that is best in life. 
One cannot be a true student of History and neglect 
that which goes deeper than Philosophy, which is 
Philosophy and something more. To be a student 
of History one must be a poet; though to be a poet 
does not necessarily involve the writing of verse. 

Ruskin says : " Great nations write their autobi- 
ographies in three manuscripts : the book of their 
deeds, the book of their words, and the book of 



104 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

their art. Not one of these books can be under- 
stood unless we read the two others ; but of the 
three the only quite trustworthy one is the last." * 
We can consider what sort of an idea we should 
have of Greece if we knew nothing of Greek art ; or 
whether we can be said to know mediaevalism if 
we know nothing of its architecture, or of Dante ; 
or of the Renaissance if we know nothing of its 
painting ; or of the age of Elizabeth in England 
if we have not read Shakspeare. The abstract 
thought of the ages is embodied and summed up 
in the succession of great philosophic thinkers, from 
Aristotle and Plato down to Kant and Hegel ; but 
their thoughts and their feelings also are embodied 
in the succession of world-poets, from Homer and 
Aeschylus to Shakspeare and Milton and Goethe, 
and the host of lesser singers, who, if they have 
any genuineness, add some touch to the picture 
these greater poets enable us to form of the inner 
life of the generation. To put life into the dry 
bones of the annalist, we need the imagination 
of the poet. Without imagination to vivify it, 
knowledge is dead ; the man of science himself, to 
be anything more than a cataloguer and labeller, 
must exercise and train his powers of imagination. 

1 Preface to St. Mark's Rest, p. I. 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 105 

It was for this reason that I included Shakspeare 
among your professional studies. 

Coleridge says that the true antithesis is not be- 
tween Poetry and Prose, but between Poetry and 
Science. The distinction between prose and verse 
is a superficial distinction of form merely. Science 
seeks truth through the exercise of the understand- 
ing and the reason. Poetry must also be truth, but 
it is truth to the imagination as well as the reason, 
— truth clothed in forms of beauty. Poetry, Philos- 
ophy, Science, are all roads to the same goal ; in 
their highest forms, the poet, the philosopher, and 
the man of science are one. The highest type of 
the man of science must possess imaginative power; 
and great poets are full of philosophic wisdom. 

I have gone over the chief factors of History, and 
the studies that are needful to make a historical 
student ; and you will be ready to imitate the ex- 
clamation of the young man in Rasselas, and say, 
" Almost thou hast persuaded me that no man can 
study History ; " for the study of History would 
seem to include the whole circle of knowledge ; and 
in one sense it does, for all knowledge comes sooner 
or later to be considered from the historical stu- 
dent's point of view. Physical Science itself can 
least of all be omitted ; for no man will study His- 



106 HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

tory right who fails to give due weight to the in- 
fluence of physical forces and physical surroundings 
on the current of human events, or to the vast ef- 
fects of scientific discovery in promoting the prog- 
ress of mankind, — a great and important, though 
not, as some current materialistic philosophers 
teach, a preponderating influence. But the very 
breadth and scope of historical studies make 
them the best of all mental exercise for the special- 
ist, for no study is better adapted to check that 
tendency to narrowness which exclusive attention to 
a specialty fosters. The student of History is led 
to look upon human life as a whole, and to consider 
human thought and human action in all their pos- 
sible relations ; and though he may not wish or 
seek to become a specialist in historic study, and 
his knowledge may therefore never attain a spe- 
cialist's minuteness, it may in its own way be quite 
as genuine and valuable. I do not mean that such 
a student is to neglect facts, and substitute for them 
some patent ready-made scheme of historical phi- 
losophy. The patient investigation of facts cannot 
be ignored or neglected ; and the poorest of all ways 
of studying History is to begin with other men's 
philosophies of History. I only mean that the aim 
and method of the general student are different 



HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 10? 

from the aim and method of the professional student 
of History. General knowledge is not necessarily 
superficial, much less is it necessarily inaccurate, 
knowledge. We may have a good general knowl- 
edge of Chemistry without being chemists, and of 
Law without being lawyers ; and so we may know 
History to good purpose without knowing every- 
thing. And, in fact, to kndw History is impossible ; 
not even Mr. Freeman, not Professor Ranke himself, 
can be said to know History. Perhaps it may even 
be said that men who have known less have known 
it to better purpose than some of those who have 
been the greatest abysses of historical information. 
No one, therefore, should be discouraged from 
studying History. Its greatest service is not so 
much to increase our knowledge as to stimulate 
thought and broaden our intellectual horizon, and 
for this purpose no study is its equal. 



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IWL^) 



,«l 



